Matt isn’t satisfied with my response. He wants a substantive example—Social Security. Can a traditionalist support it or must they oppose it? And why?
What I’ve been trying to say (not very well apparently) is that my position is pluralist and pragmatist. I have substantive positions, and I haven’t tried to hide this fact. The fact that I draw on more than one little framework in the employ of my larger one is not cynical, it’s part of the framework which I have talked about openly. Traditionalism simply characterizes aspects of my position. The first aspect I discussed is simply meta-ethics; we’re all traditionalists in practice in that our ideas have a long history before they got to us and we could add our judgment to them. The third aspect is the one that Matt seems to chafe at; the idea that sometimes some communities are able to work things out among themselves without either the use or the threat of force.
The second aspect is the only one that’s of any use to me in answering Matt’s question about Social Security. That is a respect for what has lasted.
Ah, Matt says, but Social Security has been around since 1935! And apparently non-traditionalists believe that 79 years is a really long time for a policy to have lasted, so he thinks he’s got something here, as far as a challenging proposition for traditionalists goes. Of course, 79 years isn’t much longer than the entire life of the Soviet Union, an entirely ahistorical experiment in government that collapsed under its own weight in the end. I don’t mean to compare the two in substance, I’m simply interested in time horizons; to Matt the reformer 79 must appear an eternity. To me, it tells me that Social Security is not as fragile as your typical American policy, but it’s still highly untested by time.
And let’s not forget that we’ve had to raise retirement age, increase taxes, and lower benefits before. The main problem that I see with Social Security is that it was designed to work for a specific demographic situation, and demographics fluctuate over time. “The test of time” is not just a cute phrase, it means that something has managed to survive a wide variety of scenarios and come out more or less intact. It’s no secret that Social Security is being increasingly squeezed by our aging population; the older our demographic distribution skews the more the math of Social Security simply does not add up.
Of course we can continue to increase taxes and lower benefits and move the retirement age for a while, but not for forever. Eventually you’ll have to be 200 years old and only get a dollar a year, in nominal future dollar terms.
Matt seems to think that the widespread popularity of Social Security binds me as a traditionalist to support it. But that’s just due to a persistent misunderstanding of his as to how I arrive at my substantive beliefs, as I explained at the beginning of this piece and in the previous piece.
I hope this post has answered Matt’s question to his satisfaction.