Social Security shakedown

Don't believe the Democrats: The current system fleeces blacks and working people while helping the rich. The Bush plan will change that.

By David Horowitz

Aug. 6, 2001 | With the release of the report of the Commission to Strengthen Social Security, which President Bush created to guide his reforms, the class war has heated up. Reading the Web sites of Bush's opponents takes a geezer like myself back to the days when Stalinism was the fashion in progressive circles and the Daily Worker featured fat capitalists in silk top hats with "Wall Street" and dollar signs emblazoned on their tuxedo bibs.

"Big Wall Street fans of privatization stand to make $240 billion over the next 12 years if Social Security is replaced by privatized individual investment accounts," warns the AFL-CIO's Web site in a "Social Security quiz" rigged to show that giving citizens ownership of their own money is a scary venture designed to line the pockets of the ruling class. Since the federal government, municipalities of all sizes and all government programs favored by the left also make money for the Wall Street tycoons who finance government debt, the AFL-CIO position -- if consistently argued -- would lead to the conclusion that government itself is a bad thing and should be opposed. In fact, what the AFL-CIO socialists really want is to eliminate the system of private enterprise and have the state finance, and politicians control, everything in sight.

The Democratic National Committee is not really very different from these union socialists. Labor finances Democratic Party operations, shapes its campaigns and supplies the lion's share of its activists and ideas. Not surprisingly, the DNC has an identical view of the Social Security issue: "The Wall Street crowd, which was generous in its financial support to the Bush campaign, likes this plan." Ergo, it's bad. But one would have to be brain-dead (or have slept through all those Clinton-Gore fundraisers) to not realize that Wall Street is not a one-party slush fund.

Those of us who are not saddled with the burdens of Marxist purity understand that this is how things should work in a capitalist world. Small "d" democrats prefer a system in which Wall Street plays a significant role because this setup has provided more wealth to more people -- to more formerly poor people -- than any other system in the history of mankind. It is private corporations that made the liberation of the working poor possible. Only religious fanatics of the Seattle-Genoa sect will deny it.

One of those fanatics -- Gerald McEntee, president of a government bureaucrats union (AFSCME) -- declared that the Bush reform plan was "Welfare for Wall Street." The leftist McEntee was a key fundraiser and strategist for Al Gore in the last election. That the Democratic Party is dependent on Neanderthals like McEntee illustrates its problem. Even though it feeds sumptuously off the capitalist teat, at election time it is still a prisoner of the socialist mind-set. Guided by the reactionary prejudices of the left, it acts in power as a mighty brake on social progress and social reform. If this is too counterintuitive for the average Salon reader, think of the Democrats' 20-year war against Republican reformers over welfare. Theirs was a futile effort to defend an indefensible system that did more damage to the inner-city poor, and to minority poor in particular, than any system has done to any group since the abolition of slavery.

Likewise, our current Social Security system hurts the minority poor and working class disproportionately. To understand the destructiveness of the Democrats' agenda, it is necessary first to clear away the ideological fog they have created to smother the Bush reform. The commission overseeing the reform is, in fact, not a Wall Street-Republican cabal but a bipartisan group cochaired by former Democratic Sen. Pat Moynihan. The practical proposal to reserve 2 percent of individual retirement plans for private accounts is already a practice in Social Democratic Sweden. These facts, of course, aren't enough to dissuade ideological storm troopers like the editors of the Nation from denouncing the plan as a "Social Security heist" for the rich. But others should be more open-minded.

Next page: The current system helps the rich and screws blacks