Precautionary principles
By Jane Galt
Arnold Kling talks about Social Security ostriches:
Mankiw is arguing against those who say, "Leave Social Security alone. It's not broken yet." The fact that anyone would make such an argument is a sign of desperation, in my opinion. I cannot believe that someone would seriously suggest that we should wait until there is a huge shortfall in Social Security funds before we do anything about it. It seems to me that if you are going to reduce people's retirement benefits, you ought to give them fair warning while they are young, rather than wait until the last minute.
I find it interesting to note that if you replaced "social security crisis" with "global warming", you'd find that most liberals and conservatives had neatly switched positions. Why? Because addressing each crisis requires cutting into something that one side values; free enterprise, on the one hand, and the progressive structure of social security, on the other.
Easy for me to say, of course; I'm one of those rare cats who thinks that we should do something sooner rather than later about both global warming and social security, so it's fun for me to sit on the sidelines with my "Tu Quoque!" sign. But I'm trying to make a serious point, which is that all of us look for ways to defer unpleasant decisions into the future; we differ only on which decisions strike us as unpleasant.
Deferral is not a good strategy for problems of these potential magnitudes. Time gets rid of some problems, but it makes others, like demographic crises and cumulative environmental damage, worse, and as most of us know from our own experience, ignoring problems in the hope that they'll go away generally results in a full scale disaster rather than a manageable inconvenience. |
