抛砖引玉而已，但东北已经在试点了（充实个人账户），因此这方面的研究可能在中国更有现实意义（附文一则）：

The Shady Origins of Social Security 1/6/05 by Sheldon Richman

This brings me to the final defense of privatization [of Social Security]: the payroll taxes you pay are your money, and you ought to be able to do what you like with your money. This, I suspect, is the real justification behind the move to privatize, and it is the worst reason of all. The payroll tax is not "your" money; it's our money. Social Security was created as an insurance scheme, not a pension scheme. It was meant to provide a safety net, to protect the unlucky from immiseration in old age. The benefits we get are not payouts from accounts in which we have accumulated our own private stash. What we get is largely determined by what we earned, but we keep getting it even after we've taken out every penny we put in. And if we happen to die early, someone else reaps the benefits of our contributions. -Barry Schwartz, New York Times, January 5, 2005

Professor Schwartz, who has made a name for himself by cleverly asserting that since having lots of choices can be perplexing, the government should make many important decisions for us, shows by this paragraph that he is capable of another kind of sleight of hand. (See his The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.)

He begins the paragraph by claiming that the money taken through the FICA payroll tax is not the property of those who earned it. But while appearing to defend that position, he actually pulls a parlor magician's trick: he misdirects his audience's attention away from tax revenues and toward Social Security benefits. Whatever point he may end up proving, it is not the one he set out to prove. That makes me doubtful that he can prove it. I'll explain.

As Schwartz writes, "The benefits we get are not payouts from accounts in which we have accumulated our own private stash." Precisely right. That people have that impression is attributable in no small way to official deceit. (More on that below.) Those payouts, rather, are the result of the government's confiscation of current workers' private stashes. But Schwartz is supposed to be defending his claim that workers don't own the money forcibly taken from them by the payroll tax. Instead he seems to be arguing that we don't own the benefits. Big deal. No critic of the system claims that Social Security recipients own the payments promised by the system. In fact, the lack of property rights in one's retirement income is a basic criticism leveled at Social Security. Either Schwartz has forgotten his own point or he doesn't want us to think about it.

Although it is true that Social Security tax revenues and benefits are two sides of the same coin, there is a distinction between the money someone pays in taxes and the money he later receives in benefits. One can easily construct an argument to show that each person has a natural Lockean right in the first-the fruits of his labor-but not in the second-the fruits of another's labor. Schwartz puzzlingly conflates the two. (See among other FEE archive articles, this one.)

If, as Schwartz asserts, the money doesn't belong to those who earned it, to whom does it belong? Schwartz says, "[I]t's our money." Whom does he have in mind? How can it be ours but neither yours nor mine? This is collectivism of the rankest sort.

Schwartz seems to be arguing that any individual right to that money was abolished with the passage of Social Security seven decades ago this year. He describes the system as though it were an act of divine intervention: "Social Security was created as an insurance scheme, not a pension scheme." The passive voice is good for shrouding important matters, such as responsibility. The actual story of the genesis of Social Security sheds a good deal of light. According to Charlotte Twight, in her superlative book Dependent on D.C.: The Rise of Federal Control over the Lives of Ordinary Americans, "Contrary to conventional wisdom, the public did not desire the compulsory old-age 'insurance' program that we call Social Security when it became statutory law in 1935. It was passed and later expanded despite initial public opposition and strongly prevailing ideologies of self-reliance." Essentially, the government had to fool people into accepting the program. It did so by misrepresenting Social Security as insurance and by using many other devices to make it difficult for the public to find out what really goes on in Washington. (Twight calls this "manipulating the political transactions costs.")

No Demand for Social Security

As Twight notes, after five years of depression, nothing like Social Security had been sponsored by a member of Congress. She quotes Carolyn Weaver, a historian of Social Security, who has written, "[T]here simply was no significant demand for such a program." When President Roosevelt had the idea proposed in Congress, Weaver wrote, "no ground swell developed in support of social insurance programs because they did not affect the major problems or relieving the victims of the depression."

Although most people did not want to see the government get into the pension business, they did favor federal help for the elderly who had lost their savings. A bill to that effect was wending its way through congressional channels―until Roosevelt, who wanted full-blown Bismarckian compulsory social insurance, told Congress to hold off passing the ad hoc aid. Twight reports: "This postponement was critical in preserving needs-based old-age assistance as an issue that later could serve as a lever for moving Roosevelt's controversial program of compulsory old-age insurance through Congress. (Otto von Bismarck is credited with constructing the first modern welfare state in the late nineteenth century. The Social Security Administration pays homage to Bismarck by posting his photo here.)

Roosevelt set out to make opposition to his plan politically costly. Drawing on Weaver's work, Twight enumerates FDR's strategy: "(1) control information flowing to Congress and the public; (2) dominate the agenda with the presidentially backed bill; (3) package the compulsory old-age insurance provisions with other, more popular, programs, such as federal funds for old-age assistance, unemployment compensation, and maternal and child health services; and (4) refuse to sign individual sections of the bill if separated from other sections (an 'all-or-nothing' offer or tie-in sale)."

In other words, Roosevelt wanted to make it virtually impossible to oppose his unpopular socialistic plan without also effectively opposing more modest publicly supported measures. As Edwin Witte, executive director of Roosevelt's Committee on Economic Security, wrote, "I doubt whether any part of the social security program other than the old age assistance title would have been enacted into law but for the fact that the President throughout insisted that the entire program must be kept together." (Quoted in Twight, p. 83.)

No effort was spared in having Social Security ride on the coattails of old-age assistance. "Moreover," Twight explains, "they placed the popular old-age assistance title first, believing it [in Witte's words] 'had the effect of drawing away opposition from other titles, which had much less popular support.' When it seemed 'probable that the old age insurance titles would be completely stricken from the bill' and leading Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee advised the president 'that the old age insurance provisions could not be passed,' Roosevelt 'insisted that this was the most important part of the bill and very definitely gave these Administration leaders to understand that all essential parts of the measure must remain intact.'"

According to Twight, Witte acknowledged in his book, The Development of the Social Security Act (1962), that members of Congress received mostly "critical or hostile" correspondence about Social Security. He said that the "net impression [was] that there was serious opposition to the bill and no real support." He went on, "Few members of the Ways and Means Committee were sympathetic with the economic security bill." Many of them voted for it, Witte wrote, only because "it had the endorsement of the President."

More Deception

Tying Social Security to a popular modest program of assistance to the elderly poor was not the only device used to win passage. Another device was gradualism-starting a radical program on a small and seemingly unthreatening scale, saving the major expansions until later, when people have gotten used to the idea. As Twight explains, "The bill that became law established a compulsory old-age benefit program quite different from the one we know today. Many groups were excluded from coverage; the payroll tax rates were low." Seeming to divide the tax between employer and employee was another way to camouflage the full meaning of the program. While that division makes it appear that companies pay half the tax, in fact they may pay none of it at all (depending on the particular labor market). Employees may actually pay most or all the tax because their cash wages may be lower than they would be in the absence of the FICA tax. Businesses can't pay taxes; they can only collect them.

In later years, the program changed in important ways. Twight writes: "The record documents a sustained and systematic expansion: increases in worker categories covered, expansion of levels and types of benefits, increases in payroll tax rates and in the taxable wage base, the switch to pay-as-you-go financing (divorcing benefit increases from the necessity of immediate tax increases), and a decrease in the relative importance of means-tested old-age assistance."

The American people eventually came to favor Social Security, but not until "[g]overnment officials…actively sought to reshape public opinion." Twight's book documents this campaign in great detail. That effort included hiding the program's present and future costs and describing Social Security in misleading insurance terms. This is how Americans (apparently including Schwartz) came to believe they have a contractual relationship with Social Security similar to the relationship with a private insurance company. (They don't: The Supreme Court said so twice. Besides, a contract requires consent, which is lacking in Social Security. See this Cato Institute paper [pdf].) Once the U.S. Supreme Court declared Social Security constitutional in 1937, Twight explains, "Program administrators immediately adopted 'insurance' language and revised their brochures accordingly. They lost no time in changing the name of the Bureau of Old-Age Benefits to the Bureau of Old-Age Insurance." The words premiums and contributions were favored over taxes. "Ironically, insurance terminology was incorporated into statutory law in 1939-at the very moment when the elimination of full-reserve financing rendered the insurance analogy less plausible."

The upshot of the government's disinformation campaign was to diminish or eliminate the public's ideological opposition to a socialized retirement system. As Twight explains, [T]he insurance imagery has served several important functions. It reduced opposition to payroll taxation and blunted criticism of the regressivity of the payroll tax. If, as Social Security pamphlets suggested, each taxpayer had his own "account" and was thereby saving for his own retirement, fewer low-income taxpayers would quarrel with the fact that they were required to "save" at disproportionately higher rates than high-income taxpayers. At the same time, the insurance imagery dulled political reaction to the benefit structure. If the tax-benefit relationship was perceived as an insurance contract, fewer poor retirees would complain about the spread of benefits across the income spectrum, and-given the substantial spread-fewer formerly high-income retirees would resist the progressivity of the benefit schedule in paying more than 'actuarially fair' amounts to poor retirees. Finally, by perpetuating the myth of a self-supporting system, the insurance imagery obscured the eventual need for either general revenue financing of old-age benefits under the pay-as-you-go system or eventual default on promised benefits, whether accomplished overtly or covertly through such now familiar devices as eligibility delay and benefit taxation.

Political Advantage

Why did the Roosevelt administration engage in subterfuge to get Social Security established? Obviously, it calculated that a clear and honest proposal would have been rejected. (Gross deception was a trademark of the Roosevelt years, but I guess that really does not distinguish his administration from others.) A later Social Security administrator, Wilbur J. Cohen, once said of the language used to describe the program, "Its value is in what it conceals rather than what it reveals" (Twight, p. 75).

But why did Roosevelt want Social Security in the first place? One could advance the theory that FDR and the Brain Trust cared only about the public interest, their insight into which was superior to that of the people themselves. (This is called "democracy.") But the Public Choice school of political economy has provided ample reason to doubt such public-interest explanations for what politicians do. The more likely reason is that Roosevelt and his coterie saw the long-term political advantage of Social Security, namely, the vote-getting potential of making everyone dependent on government for his retirement income. Later politicians have certainly enjoyed spending the billions of dollars taken in by the payroll tax that were not immediately paid to retirees.

Social Security's shady origins can hardly justify Schwartz's contention that Americans relinquished their individual rights to money taken by threat of violence under the Orwellian-named Federal Insurance Contribution Act. Legal plunder by any other name smells as rancid.