| > The form of this argument is very popular wrt to the minimum wage, too. I've never seen it; it's pretty clear that minimum wage isn't a fallback in case of private arrangement failure (that's welfare, not minimum wage.) > We can make these programs whatever we want them to be. Sure, we could make a general universal first-resort pension. SS has never be designed to be or marketed as that, so you shouldn't expect it to be. (That's orthogonal to whether you should reform it to be one, or replace it with one; a portable, universal, public, actuarially sound defined benefit pensions is, IMO, a great idea.) > I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care very much about the intentions of the people who happened to write the original law. I don't particularly care what you care about. The discussion was over various perspectives of the decline of social security, starting with whether it would fail to be there—it was then suggested that it would for political reasons, but the real question was whether it would be an adequate retirement. I was pointing out that the fact that it was perceived as unlikely to be should be unsurprising and not a sign of decline, since it never had been in the past and was never deisgned to serve that purpose. |
Re: the form of the argument as it applies to minimum wage, it works like this:
Argument: "Minimum wage isn't enough for a family to live on!"
Response: "It was never intended to be enough to live on. It's for teenagers, etc, etc."
Note that this path leads us away from all the interesting questions about the minimum wage and into an argument about what lived in the hearts of the people who wrote the original law. That's the inevitable result of this kind of argument and the thing I'm objecting to.