Over at the Daily Beast, David Frum writes about the question he would have posed during the Supreme Court’s oral arguments if he had the chance. But in the process, he seriously distorts the concept of Social Security private comments in an attempt to liken them to the individual mandate:
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For many years, libertarians like those at the Cato Institute have advocated replacing Social Security with a mandate on all citizens to save for their retirement in a privately managed account.
Question: If it’s unconstitutional (as the challengers to the Affordable Care Act now argue) for government to require citizens to buy health insurance coverage from a private provider, how can it possibly be constitutional for government to require citizens to buy a retirement annuity from a private provider?
The logic of the challenger’s case is that the only constitutionally permissible way to provide for social needs is through a big government tax-and-redistribution program.
If the healthcare mandate is unconstitutional, how can compulsory private retirement accounts be permissible?
Frum might have an interesting point here, if his description of private accounts were remotely accurate. But he neglects a key point — those accounts would be completely voluntary. Under typical proposals, workers would have the choice as to whether to stay in the current Social Security system, or divert their payroll taxes into personal accounts (the big difference among proposals tends to be how much of their taxes they can divert). In fact, the Cato Institute article Frum links to, written by Chile’s former secretary of labor and social security, describes his nation’s experiment with personal accounts this way: “Chile allowed every worker to choose whether to stay in the state-run, pay-as-you-go social security system or to put the whole payroll tax into an individual retirement account.” (Emphasis mine.)
This is a far cry from “compulsory private retirement accounts,” as Frum describes them.
And while I’m at it, I should also respond to another Frum post in which he argues that conservatives who think the health care law should be struck down are “unwitting advocates of single payer.” His point being that if the government raised taxes to finance national health care it would pass constitutional muster even though it would represent a much larger expansion of government’s role than Obamacare. Yes, that may be true, but it would also be a lot more politically difficult to pass single payer.
At the height of their power in 2009, Democrats had 258 House seats and 60 Senate seats — and yet they couldn’t even raise single-payer as a serious option. A single-payer bill authored by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., had just 87 co-sponsors. So, to make the bill more politically palatable, they passed an unconstitutional law that conscripts individuals into the health insurance market to correct in a distortion in the market caused by other Congressional actions. If Democrats want to start an honest debate as to whether Americans want a massive tax increase to pay for a full-fleged Canadian-style national health care system, I say, bring it on.
