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Opinion #1
Debater: The Wild Goose
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Social Security is ultimately self-defeating.
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I have already explored Social Security's structural similarity with a pyramid scheme, or "Ponzi Racket". The key difference, of course, is that people are forced to continue paying into Social Security, which in theory should sustain it- any Ponzi scheme can work as long as it has an ever-expanding pool of suckers buying into it.
The problem with this is that the pool of compulsory "suckers" entering Social Security is not expanding, but contracting- fertility rates in most Western nations are plummeting. Interestingly, there is a very strong correlation between increased Social Security payments and decreased fertility rates. The reason, of course, is that Social Security destroys the incentives to have children (see my other arguments and the supporting URL). Eventually, SS will collapse.
To stave off the collapse of the system, many Western nations with Social Security programs are importing huge numbers of immigrants, but this, too, is a short-term fix to a deeper problem
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Supporting URL[s]:
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http://www.mises.org
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Opinion #2
Debater: paraquat99
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Gov't. will pick up tab for elderly/infirm/disabled one way or the other.
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Goose makes several good points but I AGAIN ask him to define a "normal" society. If his definition is "first-world" nations, I doubt that "people are cared for by their communities and families when they become old or infirm." Because in most European nations (and even Canada) countries have a broader, cradle-to-grave-style social welfare programs that include not only the young, old and infirm but pretty much everyone else (i.e. universal healthcare, et al). While I too wouldn't necessarily like to see that expansive in the U.S., he fails to answer the following: w/o programs like S.S., what happens to the elderly or infirm whose families have abandoned them or all-out died? Society will either a) still pick-up the tab to assist them OR b) let them sink and perish. Before S.S. the infirmed were all lumped together and put-in gov't.-funded, often abusive, institutions anyway. The elderly poverty was twice as high as it is today. Abolishing S.S. is idealistic but NOT realistic.
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