Employers pay half of Social Security taxes collected--given how easy it is to relocate a factory to a country where nine year-olds toil for pennies an hour, how likely do you think it is that employers would pony up that 6.45% a year for their employees' retirement if not compelled to legally?
From a distributist perspective, of course you can't but the solution to that problem is to try to minimize the number of jobs, and maximize self-employment. Hilaire Belloc (one of the thinkers Day followed to a significant extent) was pretty clear on that.
Social Security also covers young families when a parent dies or becomes disabled.
Day's point (and honestly I am somewhat ambivalent on this aspect of social security) is that it shouldn't be the role of the "holy mother state" in her words to do this but rather the role of parish and community instead. To the extent the community can take care of their own, I think that does bring us together. Keep in mind that day devoted her life to helping the poor in a very hands-on visceral way, both in her social teachings and her life's work.
Families are smaller today. It is more difficult for an only child--or one brother and one sister--to assume economic responsibility for their retired parents--and if you think that turning Medicare into a voucher program would make it any easier for that brother and sister, think again.
Turning Medicare into a voucher program would be a disaster and would pose the same problem I have with Obamacare, namely that it would trap people into health insurance agreements with parties they might otherwise want to choose not to do business with. You don't bring about better quality and lower cost by taking away the right of the purchaser to say no. Anyone who thinks that is a "market solution" is deeply misguided.
I am in favor of block granting Medicare and Medicaid to the States but for distributist reasons, namely that the control really should be on the most local level possible. It's worth noting that I take hell from this from the left even though the much-vaunted Canadian "system" is actually "every province has their own system." I suppose to the Republicans the Canadians are Socialists, and to the Democrats they are States Rights' Nutzos.... But that political discourse is so vitriolic in this country is the problem and it gets in the way of solutions. Day's arguments against social security are very relevant here. Her argument is against central, government control, displacing families and communities as support structures.
I don't have a problem with state-by-state single payer for example (essentially that's the thrust of the Canadian system) but a federal single payer system would be a financial disaster if Medicare and Medicaid are any indication. It is worth noting that our public sector spends more per capita than any other nation in the world on health care, and that's only public sector spending. If this were Canada, what we spend on Medicare and Medicaid *alone* would cover every American. Maybe we want shorter waiting lists so we can afford to pay a bit more, but that still should be a cause for reflection as to how messed up health care (including Medicare) is in this country.
Most people I know struggle valiantly to help their parents and adult children when they are called upon to do so. I even know some seventy year-olds who try their best to help their ninety year-old parents (yes, people live longer nowadays.)
But the problem is, without a general expectation you only get the downside. You don't have the possibility of a real quid quo pro develop. People only support their parents when they are sick and injured, not when they are healthy and can contribute to raising the kids, and so forth. What we have is a system of one-way support as needed, not a system of mutual companionship and support. That's the difference.
(snip)
I grew up in a household with my grandparents. Self-employed people didn't pay in to the Social Security system initially, and my grandparents didn't have any benefits--all they had was my parents. There were seven of us sharing one bathroom. It was crowded. In 1966 the government started giving elders who didn't have Social Security a little benefit--$45 a month. My grandmother was so happy. Even though she was a big physical support to my parents (who both worked full time so that they could afford to support my grandparents and us) she felt very ashamed of not having any income of her own and being so dependent. That $45 gave her a little bit of independence, and she was happy.
Do you think Dorothy Day would have thought it was good for my mother not to be a SAHM so that she could support her parents who didn't have Social Security? I don't. When my parents were retired, they were so happy to be able to spend lots of time with their grandchildren. My mother was especially happy, because she had never been able to spend very much time with us since she worked FT in NYC so she could afford to take care of her elderly parents.
I have watched four grandparents slowly wither away in social isolation when even visits by children every week, or for several days a month, couldn't offset the isolation that came with independent retirement.
I have also lived in a house where I was generation 3 out of 4, where 7 people were often sharing a single bathroom. I understand the crowding issues.
However, given the choice, there is no question which is worse. I have watched my grandparents and my wife's grandmother in two very different environments. The multi-generational, bilateral support is clearly better for everyone even when it is crowded.
What makes life worthwhile in life is other people, and contact with other people. To the extent social security robs us of that in our later years, it is an insidious theft.
Jim said:
She had a communistic mind set in that the community should live for the common good. This was during the depression when many intellectuals were advocating communism, in it's purest form, without realizing the consequences of a system, when not every lives according to the ideology. She, probably had a great misunderstanding of what SS was going to be, being it was just being formulated by FDR.
Day, in the same column, said that helping the poor become owners was an important way to elevate people out of poverty. That's not a communist mentality by any means. Her view, following that of Belloc and Chesterton, was that we should move to a more decentralized society and economy, where there are fewer big businesses, more self-employed. In this ideal the farms are small (Chesterton's slogan was "Three Acres and a Cow"), most people own their own means of production, and most people create their own jobs. You have a perfectly competitive free market, but no division between capital and labor. I don't think you can call this communism. It certainly isn't liberal capitalism either. Again the Distributists (and Day was one) defy either left or right categorizations.