Like any government program that intervenes in a sphere in which the state should not be meddling in the first place, government run pensions are basically doomed to fail. It’s time to wind down the ones we have and let individuals choose their own retirement options.

Indeed, the Social Security scheme is an excellent example of how government programs, once established, gradually become far more costly—in real per capita terms, not just aggregate terms—as time goes by.  Many recipients now spend decades collecting benefits on a program that had been sold as a program only for people who were too old, exhausted, and injured to work at all. Meanwhile, fewer and fewer workers are called upon to foot the inflated bill. 

These growing commitments from Social Security are further aggravated by the fact that while the retiree population is growing, growth in the work force is stagnating. Since 1960, the total number of Social Security recipients has increased by 364 percent. Meanwhile, the prime age population (age 25-54) has grown by only 90 percent. Put another way, in 1960, there were 4.6 prime age workers per Social Security recipient. In 2020, that number was 1.9.