In the Feb. 1952 issue of The Witness I argued that the Social Security scheme in our country was financially dishonest, would contribute to national bankruptcy, and was an indication of the low moral standards of eighty percent of the people. In the April 1953 issue Mr. Edward F. Hankin published a reply.
Basing my rough estimate on Congressional voting, I had said that eighty percent of the people approve of Social Security. Mr. Hankin thinks he refutes me with "a little simple arithmetic (that) changes the eighty to two." On Aug. 1, 1952, he says, only two percent of the population received Social Security payments. How this shows that the other 78% do not approve of the scheme is hard to understand. Mr. Hankin's simple arithmetic may be unimpeachable, but the same cannot be said for his logic.
Aside from this irrelevant arithmetic Mr. Hankin attempts to reply to my charge of injustice. Social security is dishonest because it penalizes the honest and thrifty and subsidizes the irresponsible. Even in the case of those who pay for part of their benefits, the system is so set up that under certain circumstances they receive less than they paid in, or even may receive nothing. Private insurance and annuity companies, operating on actuarial data, do not cheat their policy holders in any such way. But Mr. Hankin says "necessarily when any new system is put into operation, there are some who receive benefits they have not paid for." This is of course a false statement, and can only be based on ignorance of the insurance business.
Further, this argument seems to me to assume that theft and injustice are legitimate when used to get a system started. The labor unions used this principle to justify their violence, murders, riots, and insurrections in the thirties: they were just putting their new system into operation. This is also the Communists' principle. Massacres are justified because they produce Utopia. What was Paul's remark about those who say, Let us do evil that good may come?
But Mr. Hankin seems embarrassed at Scriptural references, and argues that Paul in II Cor. 12:14 did not mean what he said but inadvertently used a colloquial expression of that day. Paul, we remember, also quoted a Stoic poet, but he did so because the Stoic had told the truth. Nor does Paul's command that parents should lay up riches for their children rather than lay up debts for their children conflict with the duty of children to take care of their parents when through disaster they are left penniless. Maybe New Dealers have recently become conscious of moral obligations toward the aged (though I interpret it more as a grab for power and an attempt to establish socialism), yet Christian have recognized these obligations in all ages. It is not something new as Mr. Hankin says. Mr. Hankin's fallacy consists in inferring from the fact that something should be done, the erroneous conclusion that the government should do it. Apparently he would crush all private enterprise and philanthropy.
Mr. Hankin new the beginning of his article complains that if what I said is correct, the United States is in a bad way - as if the certainty that the United States could not possibly be in a bad way refutes my contention. But we surely are in a bad way. For interest readers I recommend, To Comminism Via Majority Vote, by Admiral Ben Moreell; The T. V. A. Idea, by Dean Russell; Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt; Planned Chaos, by Ludwig von Mises. And beyond these one can try Spengler, Toynbee, Hayek, Sorokin, and the Bible.
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