No. of Recommendations: 22
Let me keep HALF my money and not only will I drop off this particular grid, I'll be much better off.
But you won’t drop off this particular grid. You can’t. That’s the issue.
If you don’t save enough for your retirement, you’re still going to be in the country. If you don’t have enough money to pay for your own food, your own housing, your own clothing, then someone is going to have to pay for it. There’s no way for you to “drop off that grid“ without you leaving the country and renouncing your citizenship.
I know that you don’t think you would be that irresponsible, and maybe you personally wouldn’t. But because we as a society can’t determine in advance who will be responsible and who will not, we make everyone set aside enough money as a requirement of law in order to make sure that their needs later in life are paid for. We don’t let them choose to run high risks, because other people will have to pay the consequences if those risks don’t pan out.
We don’t let people make terrible decisions, like not saving anything for their retirement, if the consequences of those terrible decisions will be filled by somebody other than themselves alone. As much as conservatives would like this to be the case, we do not live in an atomized individualistic society, where everyone is completely insulated from the consequences and impacts of the choices of others. We all live in a society. We all live in a community. We all live in a world where your failure to plan has consequences for other people.
That’s why you don’t get to smoke heroin, why you have to wear a seatbelt when you ride in a car, and why you have to pay into a retirement program that is 100% risk free and covers the non-earning members of your family. Because if you mess yourself up, other people will have to contribute resources to help you out.
If you run out of money at age 76, you’re not going to quietly go into the forest and let yourself starve to death - you’re going to want food, clothing, and shelter. And if you can’t provide those things for yourselves, you will be a drain on the resources of either your family, your community, or your local government. Because of that, we are going to require everyone to set aside money to cover the costs we know will exist when they’re too old to work. That is just part of what you have to do because you are a citizen of a country, not an isolated individual completely on your own in the world.
