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Comment by foxyv | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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).

> 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.

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?

When they benefit others more than you and your in-group.

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.

so the country can be productive? so it can have resources to fulfil duties to citizens?

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