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["clanSkeen" <sgian AT planetc.com>]

Toni writes:

> It's those millions who *have* paid into it.

There is no *it* to have paid into.   *It* does not nor did it ever exist.

Congress has already ruled on several occasions that individuals have no 
rights to SS funds outside of what Congress says they have at any particular 
time.  If people were deceived into thinking that there was an *it* that 
they were paying into, that's regrettable.  There are always deceivers among 
us.

Nor is there any real weight to the argument that SS is essentially an 
inter-generational agreement.  Like slavery, there is no moral enforcement 
of a one sided agreement, an agreement in which the one with the obligation 
did not have part and party in forming and never agreed to.

My grandmother used to rehearse how her father (my great-grandfather) had 
taken her aside when he was in his decline and said that she could let the 
girl (she had two children, my father and my aunt) go - she was probably 
going to marry some man who smoked cigarettes and so would not amount to 
anything - but he instructed her to keep the boy (my father) with her.  My 
father left the farm when he was 16 to work in DC as a Western Union 
delivery boy just before the war from which he went into the military. 
Many years later my grandmother rehearsed that story and said in a kind of 
'what might have been' regretful voice that she should never have agreed to 
let my father join the military when he was 19 against her father's dictates 
for what the next two generations were to do.  The truth is that he was 
going to do that anyway, no matter what his grandfather had said.  People of 
my great-grandfather's day really thought that as patriarch or matriarch 
they could tell the next few generations what to do and they were under some 
obligation to do it.  SS is much like that.  All the money that people "paid 
into"  ... "it" was spent on the people of their day.   They have neither 
the right nor prerogative no any practical means of insisting that 
generations yet unborn will do their bidding.

James