Here's How Social Security OUGHT to Operate, Not the Immoral Way it Currently Operates
Please support those who are trying to stop our rulers from making it even worse
Click here to add your name.
Social Security was won by the working class with enormous and militant struggle in the 1930s that the ruling class feared was about to make a revolution unless major reforms were granted. Read about this here.
As important as the Social Security reform was and is, it is nonetheless based on a very immoral premise. It is based on the notion that the amount of money you should receive in retirement should be greater or smaller proportional to how much you earned while working. Obviously, those who do the hardest work in our society earn the least, which is immoral, and the basis of Social Security payments is thus also immoral. As Stokely Carmichael once observed, looking around the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta, “If hard work made you rich, black people would own this country.”
What is the moral way for Social Security to operate?
Social Security—and the economy in general, as discussed here—should work like this. Those who have contributed, before retirement age, and those who are presently contributing to the economy by working reasonably according to ability (those who are unable to work or who are caring for children or going to school or who are involuntarily unemployed ARE working reasonably according to ability) should receive membership in good standing of what I call the sharing economy (discussed below), which entitles them to take for free from the economy what they need or reasonably desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need. This is how a no-rich- and-no-poor society operates, and this is what the vast majority of people want, as I prove here.
What is the ‘sharing economy’?
The sharing economy consists of all the local communities that mutually agree to share the fruits of their economic work (goods and services) with the people who are members in good standing of the sharing economy in any of its constituent local communities, on the egalitarian basis of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.”
Who decides if one is a member in good standing of the sharing economy?
The governmental body that decides if one is a member in good standing of the sharing economy is what I call the Local Assembly of Egalitarians for a given local community. Typically the Local Assembly of Egalitarians would decide if an economic enterprise as a whole is a member in good standing, and if it is then all of its workers who live or work in the local community are by default also a member in good standing of the sharing economy that the local community is a part of, unless the Local Assembly denies an individual person this good standing because they are a hog or law-breaker.
Who can be a member of the Local Assembly of Egalitarians?
Any person, whether they have ever heard the word “egalitarian” or not, who a) lives or works in the local community and who b) supports the egalitarian values of no-rich-and-no-poor equality (which prohibits anybody from possessing more than he/she needs or reasonably desires) and mutual aid and fairness and who c) agrees that such people have a right to make the ONLY laws that everybody in the local community must obey, has a right to participate in the Local Assembly of Egalitarians as an equal of all others in democratically writing the laws and policies and decisions that everybody in the local community must obey. No other people have this right.
Read about this in more detail in “What Is Egalitarianism?”