Segurança Social e Liberalismo II

Os efeitos perversos da segurança social:

1) A erosão da família (e comunidade)

- a poupança acumulada pela família deve financiar o investimento necessário nos mais jovens
- os jovens, para quem a geração acima de si nada pode poupar, têm o dever de a suportar

2) A subversão do acto moral da solidariedade que só o é quando voluntário, provocando que a sociedade civil deixa de a praticar conscientemente, espontaneamente, reflectidamente.

3) A realidade anti económica onde toda uma poupança forçada na população activa, ser de facto imediatamente consumida, não contribuindo em nada para a formação de capital (a única fonte de crescimento do nível de vida).

A ler: Social Security and the Destruction of Capital, Antony Mueller (Mises Institute)

"Social security is neither social nor secure. It is not social because the transfer system provokes the very dependency it is said to heal, and it is not secure because the comprehensive modern welfare system undermines economic prosperity.

As a coercive system of transfers from the active to the inactive, from the saver to the consumer, and from the producer to government, social security systems have an inherent tendency to destroy the formation and transformation of capital and to inhibit the division of labor.

Social security severs the link between savings and investment for the individual and puts both into the hands of government. It is by this mechanism that the illusions of wealth as pseudo-savings are being created.(...)

Under the assumption that the inactive part of the population spends most of the transfer income on consumption, the personal savings that come from the economically active group are never saved in economic terms and on net basis, but directed towards consumption. (...)

A nation, which is confronted with a growing portion of elderly, cannot in any economic sense fabricate the goods and services well in advance of consumption time, but must provide these step by step in accordance when demand emerges. Capital is not like a tree that grows by itself and each year provides the apples for consumption. Economic production needs current funding guided by entrepreneurial activity.(...)

Modern social security schemes are conceived as financial flow systems. They regulate the flow of financial funds between the so-called “active” part of the population to the “inactive” part: between the young and the old, the healthy and the sick, and with welfare payments between the haves and the have-nots. It is obvious that such a system must move toward a crisis, when the proportion between these two parts is changing toward a shrinking active part in relation to a growing share of the inactive part of the population.

When the burdens become too high for the active population, those on the margin will opt for becoming inactive, particularly when the benefits on this side are made more attractive. This way, social transfer systems enlarge the number of the needy and reduce the relative share of the active part.(...)

Coercive capital-based systems do not eliminate the vicious cycle that is inherent to the welfare state. There in lies the basic logical contradiction of the modern welfare state: the welfare state is flawed by its inherent tendency to undermine its own economic basis. The way out is not the reform of the welfare state, but its dismantlement. The cure for the system is not its reform but its demise.

Whether capital-based or pay-as-you-go, with both mechanisms government imposes an anonymous "contract" upon the citizens, and with old age social security upon an abstract series of generations. This way, a bureaucratic mechanism is implanted as a substitute for the division of labor within the family and among society and of the natural bonds that exist among the family generations and among the neighborhood.

This way, social security contributes to the erosion of the family in modern societies and to the disappearance of spontaneous private solidarity.(...)"