You can retire whenever you want. The government decides when to start funding it.
As for why - the same reason why they get to decide what side of the road you drive on and what laws you follow. They rule the patch of land you were born on, and if you don't like it you can either participate in the system (assuming it's a democracy) or leave.
It definitely answers why. You are asking for an appeal to some moral justification. But there isn't one, and it doesn't matter. That's the whole point of "might makes right".
The government doesn’t set the retirement age. You can retire whenever you want. There are no laws against a 50 year old retiring and living off his own savings, nor against a 70 year old continuing to work.
There is a minimum age to collect old age benefits from the government. The justification for that should be obvious.
The choice between working and starving to death is not a choice. If your savings have been taken by the government, then you don't have a choice.
The justification is to force people to work until they are too old to do so. Then steal whatever they have left with medical bills and price hikes on necessities.
> The justification is to force people to work until they are too old to do so.
Actually, the justification is to prevent old people from having to work. Retirement didn't really exist until the creation of pension systems in the late 19th century, and the modern social security system was a poverty alleviation measure introduced in the 1930s. Hell, social security was initially resented by older workers because of the cover it gave employers for firing them for being too old.
Social security was sold to the populace for purposes of voting as "insurance." Lawmakers straight up admitted they purposefully wrote the law in a confusing way[] -- resulting in evasion of democratic scrutiny and the scrutiny of the constitution. Then they briefly switched to not calling it insurance just for the purpose of scrutiny of the courts.
Social Security constitutionality was ruled on just months after the 'switch in time that saved 9' associated with a threatening to pack the courts and evade the checks and balances built into our "democracy." They ruled it was covered under 'general welfare' in a way that was totally historically inaccurate.
Furthermore, FDR and congress purposefully had it packaged in an omnibus style bill to evade democratic scrutiny over the individual portions, by purposefully torpedoing other aid to needy individuals if SS didn't pass, so that lawmakers wouldn't be able to vote on democratic view of SS but rather being damned in a catch-22 where they'd be accused of not helping out the needy in other ways.
Basically the whole thing was designed to not only evade democracy but also the constitution.
[] Recollections of the New Deal, by Thomas H. Eliot, pp. 102-115 (Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1991).
But the CPF isn't represented as benefits from the government. It's represented and claimed to be your own savings that you have set aside. At gamed bond rates where the government skims off the top.
To make an overly dramatic analogy, if you were kidnapped and asked why the kidnapper was able to hold you against your will, the answer is because they've chained you up and they have the gun, and so on. That's literally the answer to why. The fact that what they're doing is morally wrong is completely irrelevant.
CPF makes a moral justification by arguing it is a "savings and pension plan" under the auspices of a moral justification of helping citizens set aside their own money. The very first thing you are greeted with on their website is that it's savings and an overview represents it as "setting aside" your own funds.
The government makes a moral justification of a savings plan but then when we dig down to it it's all ether and really just a scheme for bond rate arbitrage for the government.
The point isn't that might makes right is false, it's that the moral justification is a facade.
Like I said, they don't. You can retire today. They decide when you get access to a national retirement plan. Citizens of the country vote for that plan and how it is implemented.
I personally could retire today. Most people can't. There is no referendum I remember where we decided to raise the retirement age. It seems like our government just kind of decided to do so.
Couldn’t you say the same thing about social security or pensions? There is a lot of economic forces that direct people to work until a certain age, the government controlling a benefit is only one of them. As to why, you’ll need to dissect representative democracies in Singapore’s case.
It doesn't (you can retire early), but it does decide part of what you will need to be saving and how.
And the reason it decides that, apart from "because it can", is because many societies have seen what happens when it's left to individuals to take care of this, and they fuck it up in massive numbers, and the outcome of that then fucks up society.
It is really easy to "Fuck it up" when greedy assholes jack up the price of necessities like food, shelter, and medical care. 66% of bankruptcies are due to medical costs. We should just socialize necessities like food, shelter, and medical care so there is no chance of "Fucking it up." That would cover the possibility of disability as well.
It sounds to me like we have built a system to exploit people as much as possible. Treating them like farm animals.
Yes let’s have “5 Year Plans” with centralized control instead of the free market, what could possibly go wrong? If only we had a large country that tried that and failed miserably to see what could go wrong.
Or, hear me out, we could socialize health care and tax the rich rapists that are currently running the country to end poverty in the richest country in the world.
We don't have the free market. We've never had the free market. Every economy has always been under some degree of regulation and centralized control simply by virtue of existing within the context of a society and government that enforces laws and levies taxes.
The government has never controlled the means of production for the most part except for “natural monopolies” like utilities, cable etc where everyone should be served and it doesn’t make sense to try to have two companies building out infrastructure
>We should just socialize necessities like food, shelter, and medical care so there is no chance of "Fucking it up."
How does socializing work if there are insufficient workers relative to non workers? I.e. the supply of food/shelter/medical care is insufficient to meet the demand?
Why would there be insufficient workers relative to non-workers? Socializing health care, shelter, and food does not lead to a worker shortage. In fact, having a healthier and taken care of population leads to prosperity in general. In addition, it leads to reduced costs. Countries with socialized medicine pay a fraction of what America does for better health outcomes.
The government decides when we can retire and they help us out. You can stop working today if you want, Government shouldn't pay you for it for no reason. Your duty as a citizen is to work and build your nation, eventually the government pays back that service with benefits.
This isn't something the government gives you. It is something they have confiscated and held on to.
> Your duty as a citizen is to work and build your nation
What about the duty of the trust fund babies and idle wealthy? What about the duty of the capital owners? Why is the retirement age going up instead of down as productivity increases?
Not for the majority of retirement savings in the US, where Social Security makes up only about 25%.
In the case of 401(k)s/DC plans and private pensions/DB plans, the government allowed savings without "confiscation," i.e. immediate taxation. They gave us the benefit of deferred taxation if you wait until retirement age.
They get Social Security and Medicare, which while insufficient for many these days is a lot more than they would have gotten 100 years ago.
No one is going to argue that the system is perfect or can't be improved. Good people get screwed over all the time and always will, the most we can try to do is minimize that population.
because lifespans are increasing much more, people are outliving what they used to and are using a lot more money in retirement than they used to. Old people used to sit in houses and watch grandkids, now they're flying to foreign countries for fun.
These days I wonder about that duty I have. It sure felt obligatory some time ago. I thought of myself as a patriot and that the rule of law was something we we should be proud of. A country whose own anthem spoke of "liberty and justice for all".
The current trajectory makes my question a lot of things, including this whole "government pays back that service with benefits" as it will be some time before I ever see a penny of SSI.
A lot of our taxes in this country seem like a giant waste or are grossly inefficient at best.
A lot of that here in the US is because we've lost the will to participate in the systems that establish these things. We leave that to other people, and those other people represent our interests poorly. The people in a democracy take a really long time to effect change. It can be a life's work for some people. But the premise is that if we can find common ground we can eventually see some of our ideas take shape. That does still work here, but we have to actually have real conversations with each other that respect each others' differences to get anywhere.
After a bit it just comes down to motivation. Who wants to win more: 1. Someone who has everyone's best interests at heart so is unwilling to really run against anyone and is trying to balance out support for multiple conflicting groups all while learning the landscape and job or 2. Someone who knows they can use the position to get tens of millions of dollars, and are supported by a few large groups similarly motivated? This is how you get people like Va Lecia Adams Kellum and Karen Bass.
> A lot of our taxes in this country seem like a giant waste or are grossly inefficient at best.
It's our duty to elect people who use tax dollars wisely and to vote out officials who neglect their responsibility to the people and use tax money to enrich themselves and anyone else willing to bribe them. Our government is filled with grifters because we've failed to hold them meaningfully accountable for robbing us and failing to provide the benefits we're funding.
Many of the grifters in government have been working hard to make it difficult to hold them accountable. They disenfranchise voters, they keep us afraid and our futures uncertain, they collude against efforts to reform the system they've established for their own benefit.
Government was never going to just let us have "liberty and justice for all" the job was always on "we the people" to insist on it. We can't just pay taxes and expect everything to work out. We have to use the democracy we have to force the government to work for us and not just for themselves. If we've reached a point where that's no longer possible then it's our duty to "refresh the tree of liberty" until we have a government that works for us.
Psychologically the deterioration of we the people's power happens at an even more basic level when children are taught to resolve their conflicts by seeking out an adult.
I wouldn't mind taxes if everyone paid their fair share and it went to improving the lives of everyone instead of the wealthy few. We live in the most productive times per capita that have ever existed. Why do we need to scrimp and save to buy food while the number of billionaires continues to climb?
There is no "we" and has never been. Anybody who talks to you about "we" or "us" or your "duty" is just seeking to exploit you, hoping that you're dumb enough to fall for it.
There is in fact a we. It's just not based on race, religion, ethnicity, language, gender, or sexuality. "We" are the ones who create and work for a living instead of living off the backs of others. "They" are immensely wealthy oligarchs that exploit us using their ownership of land, buildings, communication networks and machines we need to survive.
I live off your back yet am nowhere close to immensely wealthy. I know it's en-vogue to hate on shiny billionaires but reality is a lot less glamorous. It's just lazy gov workers not getting much done, then hiring more people to try to cover their work. By the millions.
Haha and yours sounds like the lies spread by communists/unions/etc attempting to wrest power from anyone who has it now. Your view leaves a lot of gaps. My view is easily verifiable by almost anyone working (barely) and getting paid by taxes. Or second and third parties getting that sweet, easy gov $$. It's also inclusive of your billionaires- many get money from the gov or gov policies too.
Your media platforms may be owned by the shiny billionaires, but the laws they adhere to are created and enforced by mobs of average 10-4 workers.
This question cannot be asked in good faith on a user board. It requires an 800 pages book on politics, history, philosophy, economics to be properly answerered and it would barely scratch the surface.
You might as well ask similar questions about most basic laws and concepts behind how western societies work.
We should each ask ourselves such questions and review our view on them from time to time during our life because they're important, but mostly by doing our own research and self study. But asking point-blank strangers such a vague question is putting an unfair burden on them.
There's maybe a few hundred people worldwide who could casually drop a proper answer to your question while casually browsing hn.
I believe it'd be more fair to start answering your own question to show how far you are in your intellectual journey on that topic.
My own answer is this. We have created a system of exploitation where we extract value from people's labor and transfer it to an oligarchicy that is slowly increasing in power. Governments are captured by that ruling class and are unwilling to do anything that threatens them. In addition, they are slowly reducing the rights and social mobility of the middle and lower class in order to expand the power and capital of the oligarchy.
Any money that is possessed by the working classes is then taxed in the form of increased living expenses or directly by the government until they can barely afford the necessities that allow them to continue working. Once they are no longer able to do so, they are discarded and allowed to die of preventable illness, starvation, drug use or exposure.
Social security is an entitlement. They have taken money from your paycheck to fund it. In fact, they have taken more from your paycheck than they will pay back to you in order to pay for an aging population. The extra goes to bonds which the government then uses to reduce inflation when they decide to invade random countries or bail out a bank.
Now, why does the government get to decide when I retire with my own money?
You can retire whenever you want. The government decides when to start funding it.
As for why - the same reason why they get to decide what side of the road you drive on and what laws you follow. They rule the patch of land you were born on, and if you don't like it you can either participate in the system (assuming it's a democracy) or leave.
This boils down to a "Might makes right" claim. It doesn't answer the question why. Only how.
It definitely answers why. You are asking for an appeal to some moral justification. But there isn't one, and it doesn't matter. That's the whole point of "might makes right".
In an attempt to steelman, you are saying:
"There is no moral justification for the government setting a retirement age, but they are able to. So it doesn't matter."
The government doesn’t set the retirement age. You can retire whenever you want. There are no laws against a 50 year old retiring and living off his own savings, nor against a 70 year old continuing to work.
There is a minimum age to collect old age benefits from the government. The justification for that should be obvious.
The choice between working and starving to death is not a choice. If your savings have been taken by the government, then you don't have a choice.
The justification is to force people to work until they are too old to do so. Then steal whatever they have left with medical bills and price hikes on necessities.
> The justification is to force people to work until they are too old to do so.
Actually, the justification is to prevent old people from having to work. Retirement didn't really exist until the creation of pension systems in the late 19th century, and the modern social security system was a poverty alleviation measure introduced in the 1930s. Hell, social security was initially resented by older workers because of the cover it gave employers for firing them for being too old.
And if I was emperor, I would abolish payroll taxes and phase out Social Security. Unfortunately, we live in a democracy.
Social security was sold to the populace for purposes of voting as "insurance." Lawmakers straight up admitted they purposefully wrote the law in a confusing way[] -- resulting in evasion of democratic scrutiny and the scrutiny of the constitution. Then they briefly switched to not calling it insurance just for the purpose of scrutiny of the courts.
Social Security constitutionality was ruled on just months after the 'switch in time that saved 9' associated with a threatening to pack the courts and evade the checks and balances built into our "democracy." They ruled it was covered under 'general welfare' in a way that was totally historically inaccurate.
Furthermore, FDR and congress purposefully had it packaged in an omnibus style bill to evade democratic scrutiny over the individual portions, by purposefully torpedoing other aid to needy individuals if SS didn't pass, so that lawmakers wouldn't be able to vote on democratic view of SS but rather being damned in a catch-22 where they'd be accused of not helping out the needy in other ways.
Basically the whole thing was designed to not only evade democracy but also the constitution.
[] Recollections of the New Deal, by Thomas H. Eliot, pp. 102-115 (Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1991).
But the CPF isn't represented as benefits from the government. It's represented and claimed to be your own savings that you have set aside. At gamed bond rates where the government skims off the top.
I'm just saying it is the answer.
To make an overly dramatic analogy, if you were kidnapped and asked why the kidnapper was able to hold you against your will, the answer is because they've chained you up and they have the gun, and so on. That's literally the answer to why. The fact that what they're doing is morally wrong is completely irrelevant.
I know why they are able, what I want people to think about is "Why." The kidnapper has a reason.
CPF makes a moral justification by arguing it is a "savings and pension plan" under the auspices of a moral justification of helping citizens set aside their own money. The very first thing you are greeted with on their website is that it's savings and an overview represents it as "setting aside" your own funds.
The government makes a moral justification of a savings plan but then when we dig down to it it's all ether and really just a scheme for bond rate arbitrage for the government.
The point isn't that might makes right is false, it's that the moral justification is a facade.
When are moral justifications not facades?
What question do you want answered exactly? Why we have governments and not anarchy?
Why does the government get to decide when we retire?
Like I said, they don't. You can retire today. They decide when you get access to a national retirement plan. Citizens of the country vote for that plan and how it is implemented.
I personally could retire today. Most people can't. There is no referendum I remember where we decided to raise the retirement age. It seems like our government just kind of decided to do so.
Couldn’t you say the same thing about social security or pensions? There is a lot of economic forces that direct people to work until a certain age, the government controlling a benefit is only one of them. As to why, you’ll need to dissect representative democracies in Singapore’s case.
You can retire whenever you want, but you specifically would probably die in the wilderness.
You apparently know very little about me.
Edit: Although, when my time comes as it inevitably will, I think the wilderness would be a nice place to do it. Maybe in a tree.
It doesn't (you can retire early), but it does decide part of what you will need to be saving and how.
And the reason it decides that, apart from "because it can", is because many societies have seen what happens when it's left to individuals to take care of this, and they fuck it up in massive numbers, and the outcome of that then fucks up society.
It is really easy to "Fuck it up" when greedy assholes jack up the price of necessities like food, shelter, and medical care. 66% of bankruptcies are due to medical costs. We should just socialize necessities like food, shelter, and medical care so there is no chance of "Fucking it up." That would cover the possibility of disability as well.
It sounds to me like we have built a system to exploit people as much as possible. Treating them like farm animals.
Yes let’s have “5 Year Plans” with centralized control instead of the free market, what could possibly go wrong? If only we had a large country that tried that and failed miserably to see what could go wrong.
Or, hear me out, we could socialize health care and tax the rich rapists that are currently running the country to end poverty in the richest country in the world.
We don't have the free market. We've never had the free market. Every economy has always been under some degree of regulation and centralized control simply by virtue of existing within the context of a society and government that enforces laws and levies taxes.
The government has never controlled the means of production for the most part except for “natural monopolies” like utilities, cable etc where everyone should be served and it doesn’t make sense to try to have two companies building out infrastructure
>We should just socialize necessities like food, shelter, and medical care so there is no chance of "Fucking it up."
How does socializing work if there are insufficient workers relative to non workers? I.e. the supply of food/shelter/medical care is insufficient to meet the demand?
Why would there be insufficient workers relative to non-workers? Socializing health care, shelter, and food does not lead to a worker shortage. In fact, having a healthier and taken care of population leads to prosperity in general. In addition, it leads to reduced costs. Countries with socialized medicine pay a fraction of what America does for better health outcomes.
>Why would there be insufficient workers relative to non-workers?
The total fertility rate and the trends of that rate of basically every country, especially the ones with socialized medicine.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/norway/2025/
Fertility rates? The world population is growing.
The government decides when we can retire and they help us out. You can stop working today if you want, Government shouldn't pay you for it for no reason. Your duty as a citizen is to work and build your nation, eventually the government pays back that service with benefits.
This isn't something the government gives you. It is something they have confiscated and held on to.
> Your duty as a citizen is to work and build your nation
What about the duty of the trust fund babies and idle wealthy? What about the duty of the capital owners? Why is the retirement age going up instead of down as productivity increases?
Not for the majority of retirement savings in the US, where Social Security makes up only about 25%.
In the case of 401(k)s/DC plans and private pensions/DB plans, the government allowed savings without "confiscation," i.e. immediate taxation. They gave us the benefit of deferred taxation if you wait until retirement age.
What about the people who do not make enough to save and all their money goes to inflated living expenses? When do they get to retire?
They get Social Security and Medicare, which while insufficient for many these days is a lot more than they would have gotten 100 years ago.
No one is going to argue that the system is perfect or can't be improved. Good people get screwed over all the time and always will, the most we can try to do is minimize that population.
because lifespans are increasing much more, people are outliving what they used to and are using a lot more money in retirement than they used to. Old people used to sit in houses and watch grandkids, now they're flying to foreign countries for fun.
These days I wonder about that duty I have. It sure felt obligatory some time ago. I thought of myself as a patriot and that the rule of law was something we we should be proud of. A country whose own anthem spoke of "liberty and justice for all".
The current trajectory makes my question a lot of things, including this whole "government pays back that service with benefits" as it will be some time before I ever see a penny of SSI.
A lot of our taxes in this country seem like a giant waste or are grossly inefficient at best.
A lot of that here in the US is because we've lost the will to participate in the systems that establish these things. We leave that to other people, and those other people represent our interests poorly. The people in a democracy take a really long time to effect change. It can be a life's work for some people. But the premise is that if we can find common ground we can eventually see some of our ideas take shape. That does still work here, but we have to actually have real conversations with each other that respect each others' differences to get anywhere.
After a bit it just comes down to motivation. Who wants to win more: 1. Someone who has everyone's best interests at heart so is unwilling to really run against anyone and is trying to balance out support for multiple conflicting groups all while learning the landscape and job or 2. Someone who knows they can use the position to get tens of millions of dollars, and are supported by a few large groups similarly motivated? This is how you get people like Va Lecia Adams Kellum and Karen Bass.
> A lot of our taxes in this country seem like a giant waste or are grossly inefficient at best.
It's our duty to elect people who use tax dollars wisely and to vote out officials who neglect their responsibility to the people and use tax money to enrich themselves and anyone else willing to bribe them. Our government is filled with grifters because we've failed to hold them meaningfully accountable for robbing us and failing to provide the benefits we're funding.
Many of the grifters in government have been working hard to make it difficult to hold them accountable. They disenfranchise voters, they keep us afraid and our futures uncertain, they collude against efforts to reform the system they've established for their own benefit.
Government was never going to just let us have "liberty and justice for all" the job was always on "we the people" to insist on it. We can't just pay taxes and expect everything to work out. We have to use the democracy we have to force the government to work for us and not just for themselves. If we've reached a point where that's no longer possible then it's our duty to "refresh the tree of liberty" until we have a government that works for us.
Psychologically the deterioration of we the people's power happens at an even more basic level when children are taught to resolve their conflicts by seeking out an adult.
I wouldn't mind taxes if everyone paid their fair share and it went to improving the lives of everyone instead of the wealthy few. We live in the most productive times per capita that have ever existed. Why do we need to scrimp and save to buy food while the number of billionaires continues to climb?
Because we're failing to hold those billionaires accountable to the system that allows them to accumulate their wealth.
Bingo!
There is no "we" and has never been. Anybody who talks to you about "we" or "us" or your "duty" is just seeking to exploit you, hoping that you're dumb enough to fall for it.
There is in fact a we. It's just not based on race, religion, ethnicity, language, gender, or sexuality. "We" are the ones who create and work for a living instead of living off the backs of others. "They" are immensely wealthy oligarchs that exploit us using their ownership of land, buildings, communication networks and machines we need to survive.
I live off your back yet am nowhere close to immensely wealthy. I know it's en-vogue to hate on shiny billionaires but reality is a lot less glamorous. It's just lazy gov workers not getting much done, then hiring more people to try to cover their work. By the millions.
Your reality sounds suspiciously similar to the lies told on the media platforms owned by the shiny billionaires.
Haha and yours sounds like the lies spread by communists/unions/etc attempting to wrest power from anyone who has it now. Your view leaves a lot of gaps. My view is easily verifiable by almost anyone working (barely) and getting paid by taxes. Or second and third parties getting that sweet, easy gov $$. It's also inclusive of your billionaires- many get money from the gov or gov policies too.
Your media platforms may be owned by the shiny billionaires, but the laws they adhere to are created and enforced by mobs of average 10-4 workers.
Funny that you think billionaires follow laws.
You argue that they never follow any laws? You have a weird world view, sounds like a high schooler on reddit and too much THC
This question cannot be asked in good faith on a user board. It requires an 800 pages book on politics, history, philosophy, economics to be properly answerered and it would barely scratch the surface.
You might as well ask similar questions about most basic laws and concepts behind how western societies work.
Yes, you should be asking similar questions about most basic laws and concepts behind how western society works.
We should each ask ourselves such questions and review our view on them from time to time during our life because they're important, but mostly by doing our own research and self study. But asking point-blank strangers such a vague question is putting an unfair burden on them.
There's maybe a few hundred people worldwide who could casually drop a proper answer to your question while casually browsing hn.
I believe it'd be more fair to start answering your own question to show how far you are in your intellectual journey on that topic.
My own answer is this. We have created a system of exploitation where we extract value from people's labor and transfer it to an oligarchicy that is slowly increasing in power. Governments are captured by that ruling class and are unwilling to do anything that threatens them. In addition, they are slowly reducing the rights and social mobility of the middle and lower class in order to expand the power and capital of the oligarchy.
Any money that is possessed by the working classes is then taxed in the form of increased living expenses or directly by the government until they can barely afford the necessities that allow them to continue working. Once they are no longer able to do so, they are discarded and allowed to die of preventable illness, starvation, drug use or exposure.
The government doesn't decide when you retire. The government decides when it is willing to pay you to be retired.
Social security is an entitlement. They have taken money from your paycheck to fund it. In fact, they have taken more from your paycheck than they will pay back to you in order to pay for an aging population. The extra goes to bonds which the government then uses to reduce inflation when they decide to invade random countries or bail out a bank.
Now, why does the government get to decide when I retire with my own money?
Well one obvious reason is that you're not retiring with your own money; your contributions fund current retirees.
If you don't like it, join the Amish and file a Form 4029.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo