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  • From: "clanSkeen" <sgian AT planetc.com>
  • To: <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Social Security 2005
  • Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 12:02:16 -0500


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





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