Guest Post by Morbo
I realize that The New York Times editorial page must hire conservatives for the sake of balance, but couldn’t the editors get someone less embarrassing than John Tierney?
Tierney is yet another of what I, in a previous post, referred to as the “strapping capitalist lads” (SCLs), rock-ribbed libertarians still salivating over the discredited “free market is god” ideas of Ayn Rand.
For three months now, Tierney has been trying to persuade readers that Chile’s privatized retirement system is superior to America’s system of Social Security. In a recent column, Tierney blasted lazy old people for having the gall to believe they have a right to retire.
“Americans now feel entitled to spend nearly a third of their adult lives in retirement,” he wrote.
Oh, really? Some simple math shows Tierney is full of it. Most people begin working between the ages of 18-22. The retirement age is now 65, but for my generation it has crept up to 67 and may hit 70. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the average U.S. lifespan is 77.2 years — somewhat longer for women and shorter for men.
So, a person can expect to work 40-50 years and perhaps enjoy 10-15 years of retirement. Some Americans may spend a third of their adult lives in retirement, but many others aren’t going to hit anywhere near that. (And let’s face it, those last few years for most of us aren’t going to be very good as organs break down and the mind starts to go.)
Tierney also lays this gem on us: “[Social Security] creates perverse incentives for people to retire when they’re still middle-aged.” I’ve got news for Tierney: 65 is not “middle-aged.” People do not live to be 130.
Ironically, the myth of Chile as a private-accounts retirement wonderland was debunked by the very paper that employs Tierney, in a story appropriately headlined “Chile’s Retirees Find Shortfall In Private Plan.”
Here’s the bottom line: Only half of Chile’s workers are covered by the private system because so many people there work under the table. Of those who are covered, many got shafted by the private plan. Many workers who invested in it now have much lower pensions than their neighbors who stayed with the government-run system. Observed The Times:
Even many middle-class workers who contributed regularly are finding that their private accounts — burdened with hidden fees that may have soaked up as much as a third of their original investment — are failing to deliver as much in benefits as they would have received if they had stayed in the old system.
Chile’s privatization plan was put in place under the reign of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, a cruel dictator, who, when he wasn’t engineering the assassinations and torturing of his perceived leftist enemies, enjoyed experimenting with the free market. He tried privatizing education, too. That was also a bust.
I’m not saying every idea cooked up by a right-wing scumbag dictator is bad, but most of them should be greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism. Things in Chile got so bad that people began speaking of suffering from “pension damage.” Those suffering from the syndrome formed an association. The group’s president, Yasmir Farina, said, “They come to us in desperation because those who stayed in the government’s system are often retiring with monthly pensions twice as large as everyone else’s.”
In the end, I suspect that what really annoys Tierney is that some people, when they get old, simply refuse to continue seeing themselves as economic units any longer. This is deeply offensive to the core SCL belief that we were created in God’s image to work, work, work and buy, buy, buy.
Tierney snidely refers to “American baby boomers dreaming of retiring to decades of golf.” As I’ve already pointed out, it’s likely to be one decade at best, and I say after 45 years of work, an American has earned the right to a little golf.
This is hard for Tierney to grasp. After all, his job consists of penning fatuous columns a few times a week and collecting big checks. Who wouldn’t want to do that for 65 years?
But not everyone is so lucky. Some people really do work for a living. My father was a house painter. He climbed ladders, chipped paint from houses and sprayed walls for more than 40 years. I never appreciated how hard he worked until the summer after my freshman year at college. I came home and made the mistake of failing to find a summer job. My dad sent me out with his crew. Too inept to handle a brush, I was given prep work — scrapping the old paint off houses under the blazing sun. I never worked so hard in my life.
When my dad retired, he did not stop painting entirely. But as he explained to me, “Now I’ll work when I want to work.” If a job looked too big, too hard or if he simply did not like the customer, he turned it down. He spent a lot of time golfing, hunting and playing poker with his buddies. He joined a bowling league and poked around at yard sales.
I realize that not all jobs are as physically taxing as my father’s. But even office work can be mentally fatiguing. In the end that’s irrelevant. I don’t care if you operate a backhoe, file papers, program computers or sell cars. If you’ve been doing it (or some combination of different jobs) for 45 years you’ve earned the right to take a break if you want. If you’d like to keep working, I’m OK with that too. All I’m saying is that people should have a choice.
Sadly, my father died of a brain tumor less than 10 years after he retired. I wish he were still here to play golf and go bowling — and not just because he was my dad and I miss him. I wish he were still doing those things because, darn it, he worked hard all of his life and earned the right to leisure. He was not just an economic unit whose highest and best reason for existence was to produce and consume for the good of the economic order.
Tierney and his fellow SCLs just don’t understand. Sometimes, I can almost feel sorry for them.