Doug wrote: > What contract? I don't recall signing anything > guaranteeing me certain SS benefits. They'll > take my money and maybe put me in jail if I > don't pay the tax, but the level of benefits is > entirely up to Congress.
Well, you hadn't been born. But by being a U.S. citizen, you are bound by the law of the land. Contracts are always socially constructed and socially enforced. By being a U.S. citizen, you are tacitly accepting the legal framework. If you don't like the current legal framework, then you can renounce citizenship, do politics within the framework to alter it, or -- that failing, as Antonin Scalia has reminded us -- lead a revolution to change it. The laws that regulate contracts among private parties are *also* enacted by Congress. I asked why my deed of ownership is more binding that the Fed's mandate to ensure "full employment" (or whatever formulation may be coined to that end). Doug answered: > Well for one there's no definition of full > employment in law or practice, while the rights > and responsibilities of house ownership are > well-defined. That only begs the question of *why* some rights/obligations are better defined than others. Ultimately, this is a result of the underlying balance of political forces, embedded in turn in more fundamental economic and social conditions. Complete contracts are impossible. We are talking relations among human beings, which lead to a peculiar kind of "uncertainty." In general, defining rights/obligations -- including those of house owners -- is never costless. There is always a loophole, room for interpretation, both of the law (its letter and/or intent) and of the facts. Calls have to be made with lesser or greater arbitrariness. And all that is costly. That is why judicial systems exist. I don't know which share of the resources allocated to the judicial system over a given period of time are spent adjudicating disputes among private parties, in contrast to those adjudicating conflicts between the state and private citizens, but I'd bet that the former is not negligible. The issue is political power. And, IMO, in the context of the political struggle, it doesn't help us much to view the obligations that private parties contract with one another as being 24-carat type of obligations while those between the state and working people as being debased. We shouldn't fetishize either. And regarding "full employment," I say, sure, let it be 5.6% for the time being. Why isn't the Fed taking more dramatic action to get the economy back to, at least, this sort of "full employment"? Again, it is the underlying balance of political forces. So, in the context of this fight, should we emphasize that the eagle is bound by the gravity or that the eagle can fly high enough if only allowed out of the cage? To Matt Cramer's question: > doesn't the formulation of SSA and how we talk about it help > the political and legal configurations that ensure benefits are > paid? Absolutely. How we frame, phrase, word, even think of these matters makes what appears to be a very subtle difference at an individual level, but that tiny difference adds up collectively. I always go back to Marx on these matters: Pre-Marxist materialism views subjective activity as being confined to mere contemplation while the Idealists seem to emphasize the active side of the subject. In fact, the essential activity of the human subject is its practice, our engagement with the material world -- the creation and recreation of that thing we call "society." Of course, to enforce them, it is not enough that we convince ourselves that SS obligations are sacred. We have to take sufficient political action to translate that belief into a material force. But, for sure, if we collectively believe that the SS Act is all fiction, the public obligations that flow from it, can be dissolved without much happening, then its repeal (or its watering down) becomes much easier for the power that be. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
