Liberty Pen: 'Harry Browne's Social Security Solution'

Source:Liberty Pen- 2000 Libertarian Party presidential nominee Harry Browne.

Source:The New Democrat 

"From the Great Libertarian Offer (2000), Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne offers an innovative fix to the Social Security crisis. Liberty Pen" 

From Liberty Pen

I’m not sure Harry Browne understood the Social Security program and I truly mean that. (Even though he was 67 when he shot this video) Because Social Security is a true social insurance program, not a welfare state program and they are different. 

The role of the welfare state is to take care of the people and meet their everyday needs for them. Which is very common in Scandinavia. The safety net or social insurance system is there for people who need financial help when they can't financially support themselves, for whatever reasons. And in Social Security’s case there for people who didn’t have enough money to support their retirement and for people who aren’t capable of working full-time because of some disability.

So what Harry Browne is doing here is talking about converting a retirement insurance system, which is what Social Security is, into a retirement system instead. That everyone could use as their very own retirement fund. But with a libertarian instead of socialist approach to it. 

The libertarian approach has to do with private accounts that I guess individuals and their employers would contribute too, depending on the program. 

The socialist approach would be to make Social Security the sole retirement system and program in America. Single payer Social Security for all when it comes to retirement.

You can talk about all sorts of ways of improving pensions and the retirement system in America that is a public/private system. But some things we shouldn’t do at all because they would be bad for the system. Give the U.S. Government a monopoly when it comes to retirement in America. That would be one bad option. 

And the other bad option would be to take security and insurance out of the Social Security system and make sure that is always there for people who truly need it. And instead talk about ways of improving private pensions and retirement accounts in America instead.

The other issue of the Harry Browne Social Security plan, is that it's just another transfer of wealth. There's that old stereotype about libertarianism, that it's just another version of corporatism, where you transfer power not from government to individuals, but from government to corporations. 

Libertarians are supposed to against transfer of wealth. Under the Browne plan, that never caught on even 15 years later, he would've transferred money that individuals worked for and instead of giving it back to the individuals to set up their own personal retirement accounts, he would give it to private corporations, to manage that retirement money for the individuals. That's what's known as a transfer of wealth, something that Libertarians are supposed to be against.