Daily Wire face man Ben Shapiro sparked controversy on Tuesday when he advocated raising the US retirement age and called retirement itself “a stupid idea,” barring some kind of health issue.
Here is the video wherein Shapiro made his pitch for working until death:
When challenged on his castigation of retirement as “stupid,” Shapiro doubled down.
He went on to call Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”
What Shapiro is missing – as Conservative hucksters stuck in the 80s are wont to do – is that Social Security is not a matter of pure economics.
Instead, as Sacred Scripture commands, we all have a duty to look after the needs of our elders.
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It’s worth noting that parent-child obligations are structured as a two-way street in the Bible.
So at least it shows a degree of internal consistency that an internet talking head who wants to dial back Social Security also opposes the state helping young folks they’ve subjected to usury.
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I’ve pointed out the moral correspondence between Social Security and student debt relief before, asking those who support state-sanctioned usury if they’d be willing to give up their entitlement benefits.
Because Shapiro does have an economic point. Social Security in an inverted pyramid scheme that’s taxing Gen X and Gen Y to pay for Baby Boomers’ retirements.
His appeal to the economic welfare of future generatio0ns does ring rather hollow in light of his stance on state usury that would leave younger gens languishing as debt slaves.
Nonetheless, he is standing on principle by going after retirees, which I already warned would happen.
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So current Conservative principle would seem to dictate that taxpayers have no duty either to their parents or their offspring. Economic activity is a purely private matter concerned only with the individual.
Unless it concerns dual citizens of a foreign country halfway around the world.
“If Israel is forced to the wall, the possibility of nuclear exchange is extremely high. That is why it is very important that the United States provide the material Aid to Israel.”
Note the ambiguous language. You can bet it’s by design, since the state of Israel maintains a policy of ambiguity over the number – and even the existence – of nuclear weapons in its arsenal.
This isn’t the first time Israel’s shadowy nuclear program has put the United States in a foreign relations pinch. President John F. Kennedy spent considerable time and effort trying to make Prime Minister Ben-Gurion agree to biannual inspections of the Israeli reactor site. JFK went so far as to issue what many perceived as an ultimatum, yet the Johnson administration never followed through.
What’s suspicious is how a paid spokesman cast by a Hollywood producer, who also happens to hold citizenship in a foreign nation, is telling American taxpayers that we have no financial obligations to our parents or our children.
While at the same time, he insists that American taxpayers finance his other country. It’s hard not to see as an international shakedown based on the veiled threat of weapons the US was uncomfortable with that country having in the first place.
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The principled solution to these problems would be making usury victims whole and fixing Social Security instead of cutting or trashing it.
And while we’re at it, maybe we should tighten the standards under which agents of foreign powers are allowed to advocate for their foreign interests.
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That seems to be the trend these days.
How about we apply it consistently?
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“If state retirement benefits bankrupt the taxpayers, then I, the individual taxpayer, should save enough money to care for my parents in their old age. Right?”
“If by ‘my parents’ you mean someone else’s parents in the Israeli state, then yes.”
Oof level: 11
He’s doing this while Walsh is trying to push himself into the astroturfed “GamerGate 2” at the same time the establishment is trying to put Gamers on government watch lists.
No idea how anyone can listen to these people anymore.
It gets even better. This is the same Matt Walsh who’s excoriated games as violence sims and implies that culture is less important than politics and economics.
Note Shapiro’s hinting that social security worked in the past because most people died before getting it (i.e. by noting that the life expectancy was 64 with retirement age at 65). This of course misunderstands what life expectancy means. It’s not like there was a shortage of people living past 65 in 1935. Rather many people died young (and often too young to “pay into” the system, making them irrelevant for this discussion.) If you made it to 25 then making it to 78 was a very real possibility. Some people died between those two ages, but then again some people die today between 25 and 65.
Incidentally, I once crunched out the “true” life expectancy of the US, meaning the one you get by counting children killed through abortion as dying at year 0 rather than not including them in the calculation. It knocks AT LEAST a decade off the expectancy, and probably more than that due to gaps in record. So this means that it’s very possible that the true life expectancy of today and of 1935 are the same.
Strong work. And even by the cooked official numbers, US life expectancy was 79 in 2019 and had fallen to 76 by 2021. Internet Conservatives love to bandy those figures about when they can be cited to own the libz, but in this case they are not a convenient stick to beat the dog.
So if Social Security actually is a Ponzi scheme, what are you proposing to replace it with? I must be missing something here.
Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It’s a pyramid scheme. The problem now is that the pyramid is upside down, and that issue will fix itself when the Boomers make their exit from the stage.
In the past couple weeks I just happen to have read pretty much all of Pournelle’s CoDominium stories (I think there are a few one off stories in anthologies I don’t have) and this specific reference to “Taxpayers” sounds eerily familiar.