Our French friends are outraged — outraged — that the Macron government is raising the retirement age all the way from age 62 to 64 for their gubmint retraites. Retraite is French for Social Security.
Yes. I know. Don’t you ever dare cut my benefits. I earned them and I paid for them. Etc.
Of course we have the same thing here. I remember once seeing a geezer on TV saying “they’d better not touch “my” Social Security. And a 70ish woman saying the same for “her” Medicare.
I’m getting an appreciation for the South American countries from Argentina to Venezuela and their tin-pot dictators that have bankrupted themselves with handouts and inflation.
Because that’s what happens when the gubmint has run out of money to pay the pensions and the people are filling the streets with rage. The gubmint just prints more money. And more money. And things get worse and the pensions still get paid, but they are worth less and less. Until the gubmint goes full Weimar.
But how could civilized people and civilized government descend to this?
OK. We know how. All gubmints eventually run out of other peoples’ money.
And isn’t it weird. Here in the US we have the most educated and evolved ruling class in history — just ask its members — yet it is running out of money just like the most pathetic of Latin American tin-pot dictators.
I wonder. Could it ever be possible to have a ruling class that didn’t rule by handing out free stuff? And more free stuff? Until there is no more free stuff?
You economists and moralists and philosophers. Surely you must have an answer.
Or is the answer just a grift, like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen telling us that
Climate change, I believe, is an existential threat, and we will leave a world to our grandchildren and great grandchildren that will become uninhabitable if we don’t address climate change[.]
Yes, Madam Secretary. Uninhabitable. Actually, I would say that the problem to be faced by our grandchildren and great grandchildren is more likely to be that America ran out of other peoples’ money on your watch, Madam Secretary. As every regime or empire or dynasty has done before your great liberal-progressive dynasty of the evolved, educated ruling class.
So I ask again. Is it not possible for humans to conjure up a political philosophy and a regime that does not live by fighting an enemy or ripping off ordinary people to gift its supporters?
I know how it would have to be done. It would be done by making politics into a sport, and making the enemies into the opposing team and its fans, and making regime supporters into stadium fans relishing the defeat of the hated sporting rivals, but then going to the bar and sharing a brewski with the supporters of the hated enemy team.
Meanwile, good luck M. Macron, as you try to get the French people to work a couple years longer before getting their well-deserved retraites. That they paid for!