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We Asked; You Said
Feedback From Communitarian Update
Number 63
We asked:
As Americans debate Social Security and Western European welfare states experience strains
due to aging populations, many individuals have started to rethink the nature of family versus
government obligations to the elderly. As a person reaches old age and becomes infirm, should
their family be expected to care for them as long as possible, as is common in Asian
communities? Or is it primarily the state's responsibility to provide for its elderly citizens
in various institutions?
TO JOIN THE DISCUSSION, email aeblog@gwu.edu
Here are the responses we received:
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This is not an either/or issue. Millions of Americans financially care for elderly parents
and disabled family members who also receive Social Security payments. They provide shelter,
meals, clothing, transportation, aid with medical appointments, drugs, and other financial
assistance, although these outlays often are not tallied nor recognized.
As all financial advisors and consumer financial literacy educators know and teach, Social
Security payments are insufficient in retirement, illness, and old age. But Social Security
payments do partially offset the costs of care of older or disabled persons by family members.
They also give the older or disabled person feelings of autonomy and dignity that derive from
their ability to contribute to their own care.
When an older or disabled person has no resources other than Social Security, the burden on
already struggling middle and lower-income families who care for them can break their
"financial backs." The government must keep its commitment to older and disabled workers and
families should do all they can to care for their own. This, for most families anyway, is the
American way.
Lois A. Vitt, Ph.D.
Editor, Encyclopedia of Retirement and Finance
Founding Director, Institute for Socio-Financial Studies
Middleburg, Virginia
You frame the question as an abstract and very general one about family v. state responsibility for the elderly, as if we had to declare for one or the other. This is misleading. Social Security is a highly efficient means by which one generation insures itself a basic retirement income by providing the same to those who have already retired. Like all insurance schemes, it involves cost-spreading, economies of scale, and great efficiencies in the management of information costs. Its capacity to survive economic downturns outstrips that of any private insurer, however, and its non-profit status entails the spreading of administrative costs over the entire tax-paying public. By contrast, any privatization of Social Security would dramatically shift and multiply the information costs and administrative costs, placing them entirely on the individuals trying to prepare for their retirement. Like all markets, the resulting market in retirement security (retirement investments) would produce winners and losers. That doesn't sound like a communitarian solution to me, and I can't imagine why anyone would support it, except as a windfall to Wall Street.
The larger question of family responsibility for elders is complicated. The ancient Greeks had a law baring an elderly parent from suing his child for support, if the parent had not provided the child with an appropriate education (presumably adequate care more generally). That expresses a
principle of reciprocity that might shape our judgments about what responsibility a family has for its elders, but it tells us little about what responsibility we should assign to the state. There is no single, obvious principle by which to apportion responsibility between family and state.
Randall Curren
Professor and Chair of Philosophy, and Professor of Education
University of Rochester
New York
It would not be just to legally require offspring to support their elderly or ill parents. Parents have a moral obligation to their children, since they created the offspring, but the offspring did not ask to be born and did not enter into any moral contract with their parents. Of course it is morally good for children to care for their parents, and community culture and religions should promote this, but law should not require it.
In a truly free society, each person and committed couples should be responsible for their own retirement. Social security taxes violate the self-ownership of free individuals. However, communities can play a large role for the elderly. A communitarian approach to retirement is the formation of mutual-aid societies that would provide medical services, insurance, and guided investment accounts. The community culture would promote sound savings plans so that the elderly are not dependent on charity or government. The community association would help those who have fallen on hard times. This would be a true community bound together by sympathy and fellowship.
Fred Foldvary
Department of Economics
Santa Clara University
Associate, The Civil Society Institute
I am surprised at the unintelligent formulation of the question - a sharp decline from the intellectual quality we readers of the network have come to respect. Family and state are not separate realms, since the conditions of familial existence are often limited and in some cases even defined by the state in terms of taxation, the provision of public goods like education and health care, and the conduct of economic policy. Families, in these circumstances, confront the problems of the aged in very different starting positions with respect to their capacity to be of help. That is why state policies intended to afford decent social minima are indispensable moral preconditions of any increase in the burdens placed upon families. Moreover, we live in societies of considerable geographic mobility. (One would have to have the moral obtuseness of a central banker to advocate, simultaneously, more "labor flexibility" and more familial responsibility.) Enough already: Whoever wrote the question might read, with great profit, the writings on these matters inter alia of Amitai Etzioni.
Norman Birnbaum
University Professor Emeritus
Georgetown University law Center
Washington, DC
The formulation is an inadequate one. You combine (1) state responsibility and (2) institutional care for the elderly. Why shouldn't the elderly receive income that could either pay for care in an institution or contribute to a family's income? Why shouldn't the state be the collector of the money so that those who can afford more pay more in taxes, and those who can afford less or nothing receive a greater benefit? Is there an assumption that state action to achieve greater equality, or at least to subsidize low-income individuals and households, is incompatible with communitarianism?
Mike Miller
Editor-at-large, Social Policy magazine
Demography is the most "scientific" special field in sociology. The projection that in the year 20xx, the percentage of the population of age 65 and above will reach 35 percent in certain countries is quite possible. However, the inference that the ageing people will make the burden of the working people unbearable is based on some questionable assumptions.
1. It ignores economic and technological progress: Ageing is a phenomenon of rich society. A rich society has the capacity and should have the responsibility to solve the problem.
2. It ignores progress in health: We define ageing as age 65 for more than 70 years. I quote Peter Drucker (Fortune 9/28/1998, p. 170): "If you go by what corresponds to age 65 when Social Security began in 1935/6, the proper retirement age now is 79, given current life expectancy."
3. Senior employees are forced to retire partially due to lack of flexibility in the wage system. If pay goes with performance and not with seniority, many senior employees with rich experiences on equal jobs and equal pay may out-perform their young co-workers.
4. One key function of forced retirement is to provide openings for young people. In ageing society, there are less and less young people leaving schools to find jobs. Many old people can stay on their jobs.
5. The assumption ignores self-employment: The self-employed have no retirement age. They can work as long as they like.
6. It assumes that old people have no saving and automatically turn out to be the burden of society when they reach the age of 65: The baby boom cohort experienced the most blooming economy in history. They have planned for the future.
7. It assumes that old parents have given nothing to their children: Young people who have received property by heritage from their parents have the responsibility to take care of their parents. 80 percent of Taiwanese families have their own houses; most automatically will pass to their children. Many parents (as in Taiwan) gave their children a unit of apartment.
8. It ignores the problem of the medical system: Old people are not big spenders. Their largest expense is medical and caring expenses. Nevertheless, it can be the heaviest burden of the social security system. But it is also the big cake for the medical sector. The more we spend on healing and caring for the old, the more prosperous the medical sector turns to be (also in terms of jobs). Taiwan has a universal health insurance system, but medical resources are not properly distributed. Life may be priceless, but it is not fair that we spend lots to extend a few days of the life of a dying old person, but do not have adequate resources to rehabilitate a working-age person. We need to use our medical resources better.
9. Modern societies have less and less new-born babies. Regardless of East or the West, we can not rely on children to take care of old parents. Even if we have a handsome financial fund, we have to keep the economy stable otherwise inflation will wipe out saving.
Weiyuan Cheng
Department of Sociology
National Taiwan University
The issue raised is timely and important. As sociologists, some of us may know the value of family bonds, which have been disintegrating faster in the industrialised countries than in the developing Asian countries. My response to the role of the state and the family in taking caring of the aged is this:
As family is the basic social unit without which no society can survive, the first charge of the aged should be on the adults of the family to which they belong. The adults should be as much responsible to the aged and ailing of their family as they are responsible to the new-borns and to the toddlers. Only these three generations together, if not more, can make a cohesive family unit, and by implication, strengthen the social fabric.
What I said above does not mean that the state has no responsibility. Its responsibility should be primarily to integrate these three generations by imparting appropriate social values, and if necessary providing monetary and man-power support to take care of the aged within the family ambience, instead of confining the aged to old-age homes, which is more like pushing the half-dead to the mortuaries.
As of Asia, the adults in it are gradually catching up with those in the West in abdicating their family responsibility and causing the disintegration of the social fabric. This imitation malaise should be arrested at the earliest stage by all possible means. In this context, I may cite four examples from my own experience.
One, when an elderly American historian visited my home in Chennai a few years ago, he was amazed to see my elderly in-laws (mother and father of my wife) staying with us, and made an observation that "you can never think of this kind of family setup in US".
Two, when my father-in-law gradually lost his capacity to remember and even to recognize faces in his mid-70s, he was not sent to an old-age home or an asylum. My wife's family made all arrangements to keep him at home with a home-nurse to attend to his routine needs until his end.
Three, I used to spend my weekends with a young man aged about 97 -- probably one of the first few Indian journalists to report from the United States about fifty years ago -- living with his wife aged 85. When he developed some health complications his neighbours (ALL BRAHMINS, who in some sense have no familial bonds) suggested to me (and not to his wife) of shifting him to an old-age home. I said, nothing doing, he will have his end under the watchful eyes of his dear wife. He had this. His wife is now alone, managing on her own with the support of servants and friends like me. She dreads the very idea of shifting to an old-age home, which in her view, and rightly so, is commercial and exploitative.
Four, when my mother was ageing and ailing in a distant place, I insisted that she should be with my sisters until her end, with financial support from me. She had a happy end in the house of one of my sisters, and when I look back I feel happy.
There are elementary lessons in all these, which our youngsters fail to understand in their anxiety to enjoy their own lives in their own privacy while forgetting the fact that if they are young and alive it is because of the aged, whom they tend to loathe and discard as they do the other disposables in their lives.
P. Radhakrishnan
Sociology Department
Madras Institute of Development Studies
Chennai, India
In some countries without government programs to provide income to the aged, those old people without a surviving male child have a very difficult time. This is in part the reason for the extreme preference for male offspring and for social institutions that favor males in those societies. Furthermore, government pension programs permit old people to live apart from their offspring and to be financially independent of them. Financial dependency and the cohabitation of parents and their adult children may not be a problem in some cases, but most people would not look forward to it and in many cases it would produce very unpleasant relationships.
Barbara R. Bergmann
Professor Emerita of Economics
American University
Washington, DC
Our government, or the politicians who represent our government, create legislation based on the whim of the people and/or what they the legislator think is best for the masses. In most cases the people scream, then the politicians pontificate what they think is the best solution and then get the masses to agree. Proposing QUICK FIX solutions to perceived problems and getting them passed through the legislature is a sure way to get reelected. But QUICK FIX solutions are not always the best solutions in the long run. Take Social Security -- a noble and kind program on the surface has helped to create more greed in government, more broken families in our communities and more distrust in our government.
Once a program meant to be a safety net for our seniors now is looted by almost every politician wanting to do something for their constituents. (Of course, always with the promise to pay it back someday.) Social Security, as a government program, has helped to create a culture of entitlement, disconnected families, and irresponsibility. No worries, government will always be there if I make irresponsible decisions in my life. No longer are families the people you come to rely on, it is the government.
It is very apparent that the government is failing at the future of this program. And they should not be trusted to manage it properly in the future. We have a unique opportunity to turn down a new path. A path of more self governance. A path of true "social" security where communities and families can participate. Yes there will be some bumps. Yes there will be people who fall through the cracks. For the future of our free society and the general welfare we must not go down the "easy" road of more government.
Social Security is failing because the program, as it is now, should fail. While I would advocate a completely voluntary system, which would start our walk back to relying on family and communities more, a more politically safe incremental next step (while still moving in the right direction) could be to allow people to have individual retirement accounts. They put money in, they are the only ones who can take money out. No politician looting. People control their own money. They pass it down to whomever they want when they die. It is theirs. At the same time, we would need to make sure that all the people in the old system are made whole. No one will be left without receiving all the money that they are entitled to. Our government has assets that it could sell off to fund the old system, and when the last check is paid still have money left over to have a big party to celebrate its demise.
Kristi Stone
Founding member of the Iris Forum
Practical considerations provide the answer to the question of whether the family or the state should be responsible for the elderly in modern industrialized societies. It is impractical for governments to care for the elderly on an inclusive, sensitive, and efficient basis just as it is impractical for the majority of relatives to afford to look after the elderly. So the practical answer is that both must become involved.
But each needs to be involved in different ways. Relatives would deliver the care while the government would deliver the financial capacity of citizens to deliver the care.
The reason why the majority of U.S. citizens cannot care for their relatives is that the richest 1 percent of U.S. families owns more wealth than the poorest 95 percent! This statistic is featured by the Shared Capitalism Institute on its web page at http://www.sharedcapitalism.org/scfacts.html
The reason why the government must be involved is to provide tax incentives for the voluntary redistribution of wealth to empower all citizens to possess the capacity to care for their elderly. Because the redistribution of wealth would be achieved on a voluntary basis, ambitious political leaders could compete to provide the required tax incentive.
The required tax incentive is outlined in "The Communitarian Update" in reference to the Bush tax cuts, available at: http://www2.gwu.edu/~ccps/communitarian_feedback_n51.html . More detailed expositions are archived at http://ssrn.com/author=26239 , refer to "Should Ownership Last Forever," "A New Way to Govern," "The Case for Introducing Stakeholder Corporations," "Agendas for reforming Corporate Governance, Capitalism and Democracy," and "Stakeholder Governance: A cybernetic and property rights analysis."
Shann Turnbull, Ph.D.
Principal, International Institute for Self-governance
Sydney, Australia
I am absolutely convinced that the extended family is the natural social-safety net. Durkheim observed that the family is the only institution large enough to have credibility among industrial-scale enterprises, yet small enough to accommodate the actual diversity of the human condition. I also believe that, until economic policy begins to deal with the household as a productive enterprise instead of merely an economic sink (a consumer), it will continue to produce distortions that discount and degrade the family at the expense of large, formal institutions. I wrote a piece in "The Futurist" ("The Corporate Family: A Look at a Proposed Social Invention," December, 1976) detailing how this could be achieved through "family incorporation." I expanded on this in my 1979 book, "The Family in Post-Industrial Society." In the past 30 years, nothing has changed in my view that the family is THE appropriate social technology to underpin society as we move through accelerating technologic innovation and economic change.
David Pearce Snyder
The Snyder Family Enterprise
Bethesda, Maryland
As a 66 year old male, semi-retired engineer, but still entrepreneuring, I believe I represent a segment of our population that regards the retirement age of 65 (or whatever) as merely a transition numeral to a new segment of active life. Therefore the whole question of social or private support needs to be rephrased for our segment: Was the monetary investment we made over our traditional work years a personal one that requires repayment now, or was it a social investment, a tax really, designed to alleviate the penury of earlier retirees?
If the latter, then the question of need requires answers before a benefit flows to us, those with lesser need should receive less or no old-age welfare. Those with lesser need could then instruct the Social Security Administration to purchase end-of-life insurance, to enable us to live out our final years in a retirement home. Indeed this could and is done by personal insurance purchase, but the lever of larger-scale would result in lower premiums.
If the former, then the repayment of the investment with interest needs be the goal, and as we live in a capitalist society -- more return and quicker return is better!
As to the question of upon whom is it incumbent to pay support for the indigent old, whether close relatives (who may not have that much), or community groups (of any kind, including religious) (this being just another way for the financial load to be spread out a bit), or government: I note that our society is no longer constructed of Patriarchal Homes (in ancient Hebrew "Batei Av", in Arabic "'Hamula", in Latin "Familia") wherein the whole extended family, the clan, was the support group, and could act with independence even of the royalty (the central government). In our society the Family is now elemental, two adults and children, and the whole system is geared around that fact, actively discouraging any other structure (just look at the IRS instructions). As such it behooves the central government to replace the old age familial security net just as it has exploited the absence of the extended patriarchy. Therefore I am fully supportive of the role of government as Old Age Insurer, and will join any battle against diminishing this role.
Harry Shamir
Plymouth, Massachusetts
It's just not feasible to say "families are responsible for care of their old people." The fact is that would leave many, perhaps even a majority, of old people on the street. In any case, that's an insane use of social resources. Do we want (for example) our finest professionals to leave their professions to become aged-care workers, on a one-on-one basis? Perhaps you mean that families should be charged a fee by someone for looking after their old people? Interesting scenario. We could borrow family punishment from Asia as well?
The simple answer is universal entitlement. Non-discriminatory, consistent with the modern ethos, avoids stigmatising recipients, economically efficient and stimulating and compassionate. And it works perfectly well.
BTW, in Australia, it is the local municipal council who are responsible for old-aged care. That and garbage collection are its principal responsibilities....Makes us pay a little more attention to local politics!
Andy Blunden
Australia
As we wrote in "Brother's Keepers", Society, Vol. 32, No 6 Sept /Oct, 1995, pp. 16-22, we are solidly on the side of the welfare state not family, more so since at that time we had to pay very high sums for 24 hour care of an aging mother (now 94) who has Alzheimers in advanced stages. She cannot do anything for herself, can no longer communicate, and cannot recognize anyone at all. It is a living death and the costs are such that we cannot afford to retire. We have to be earning a post-tax income sufficient to pay the bills. At least the welfare state in Europe to which we willingly contributed when living there would have solved (paid for and provided proper facilities) part of this problem. We once had a neighbor who shot his son to death because he and his wife could no longer continue to give him 24 hour attention to the neglect of their other children after 7 years of round the clock care between the parents without one day's break. It was murder but the court gave the minimum possible sentence after hearing their tragic story. We can still remember the day when it was expected of the eldest daughter to sacrifice herself (career, marriage, "the spinster aunt") to look after mum and dad while the other siblings got on with their lives. Are we going back to those days? Overnight, anyone can go from prosperity to poverty through no fault of their own, such as a stroke, or traffic accident, or pension plan busted by corrupt organizations. Welfare should be a community burden, paid for by those who do the best in society, the very rich through progressive taxation. They too benefit for at anytime they too can be reduced to begging and though rich they are not professionally competent to look after others, family or not, who cannot support themselves.
Gerald and Naomi Caiden
At considerable cost to my children, I took care of a disabled parent in my home through my youngest child's first eight years of life. My grandfather was abandoned by his mother at the age of 12 -- she moved without telling him, condemning him to a childhood of factory work and boarding houses -- but when she appeared at his door during the Great Depression, he took her in, and her sister as well.
I think that this question raises another important corollary (and structural) issue: What is/should be the role of government in supporting working families' care-giving responsibilities?
As childbearing ages increase, two-earner families will increasingly be confronted with having to care both for children and for aging parents (and this is a self-perpetuating cycle, as the next generation will have older parents on average and are thus likely to face care-giving responsibilities earlier in their life course, unless a rising healthy life expectancy mitigates that relationship). And as children delay leaving the parental home (in Canada at least), and parents live longer, these dual caring responsibilities are bound to occupy a growing proportion of individuals' adult years.
Struggles in conciliating work and family have been highlighted recently by Gerson and Jacobs in Contexts for the United States, and research reports emanating from the Canadian government have shown notably the mental health toll these conflicts take on individuals and families (see Dea et al. at the Policy Research Initiative, a Canadian government policy research think tank, http://www.recherchepolitique.gc.ca/doclib/DecConf/Christian_Dea_E.pdf and the Duxbury and Higgins study http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/en/lp/spila/wlb/vcswlb/05table_of_contents.shtml).
What is unclear to me at this point is whether these North American patterns are characteristic of liberal welfare states, or are common to two-earner families in many contexts, two hypotheses with very different consequences.
Amélie Quesnel-Vallée, Ph.D.
Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health
McGill University
Montreal, Canada
There are two aspects to your question: Matters of "good" social and family relations, and matters of intergenerational financial justice. I will limit my brief comments here to the finances, except to state the obvious point that getting the finances right is better for families and communities than getting the finances wrong.
A big part of the social security debate is how to assure a just distribution of financial risk among citizens over generations. I propose forming a Social Security Policy Board, similar perhaps to the Federal Reserve Board, which would be beyond the immediate winds of politics. This board could propose social security policy that Congress could either approve or annul.
Chief among this body's functions would be setting the three defining variables: The taxes paid into the system, the payments made out of it, and the age at which payments begin. Towards this end I can state three normative positions:
The most flexible of the three variables ought to be the retirement age. If more people are living longer, more people can work longer.
All retired citizens ought to receive the same-sized payment. A citizen's past contribution to marketable productivity ought not be relevant. Instead, it should be their desert as a citizen upholding the good society. All law-abiding citizens deserve a just protection against financial risk.
All income should be taxed to fund social security. There ought not be any artificial income ceiling.
Adam White
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Not sure about Asian patterns, but I presume that theirs would entail "in-home" residence, in which case I would say no to your question. Or, rather, it depends on the amities between the persons involved, and also the physical and/or behavioral capabilities of the elderly and/or other family members.
The state must provide "safety nets" for the many hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of elderly people in the United States who simply have no homes of orientation in which to lodge and find support. Further, many elderly who do not have close families nevertheless suffer from dementias that present clear and present risks to families and homes; dementias are often destructive to nuclear households, emotionally and physically. It is no small consideration that these risks would likely be much less an issue if in the United States there were prevailing patterns of collective or extended households, cooperative living arrangements. But that is not the case and it will not be the case in United States in any foreseeable future. So, I see no big desirable changes in elderly care patterns, only improvements at the margins in the present patterns of access to institutional care.
Gary Merritt
(Currently caring for an 84 year old dependent mother)
Retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer
Arlington, Virginia
I believe that to the extent it is possible and reasonable for the family to provide care for their elderly members they should do so. When it is not possible for a variety of reasons and their combinations such as, lack of adequate financial resources, lack of space in their home, the fact that every family member is working and therefore not home during the day, and so forth, then it seems to me that it is appropriate for the public sphere to join in in providing the necessary care and resources. I have had personal experience in both realms and am particularly aware of the financial strain on communities large and small to provide that care -- we need a lot more attention to this nation-wide problem at the national level -- we need to stop giving the rich more money and start taking care of those in need. That's my take on the matter.
My husband's mother, a remarkable woman who died just two years ago at 91, was in the process of dying for about 5 months and we had the great good fortune of being able to keep her in her own home and bed with the help of aides and Hospice (they are incredibly wonderful). So I do have some experience with this stuff, as well as even more with friends and their situations.
Nancy Lovejoy
Wilbraham, Massachusetts
In the United States, the question "should their family be expected to care for them as long as possible?" cannot be answered without first answering whether the majority of families now, and in the near future, say the next 25 years, have the capacity to care for their elderly family members, and if the majority is, how should the minority enable themselves to do so also?
The choice offered is certainly too stark. The resolution must include both the family and the state with a decided emphasis on the state, not only because the elderly are human beings needing care living in an extremely wealthy nation - as if that isn't enough - but also because the elderly, in probably every case, have made some significant contributions to the nation's economy, and more importantly, to the quality - economic, social, and cultural - of life in the nation.
Robert Justin Lipkin
Prior to the imposition of substantial personal income taxation, the family was, and probably should have remained, the primary source of support for elderly members. That assumes that there were family members alive and capable of providing such support. But in a society where, throughout teenage and adult life, government absorbs a substantial share of an individual's income, the dynamics change. Money that could have been stored or invested with the individual's old age in mind has been diverted to social purposes. In return, therefore, the Big Reaper is obligated to care for the older taxpayer whose nest egg it has thinned over a lifetime, and whose capacity to earn is diminished.
Tedson
Arlington, Virginia
State or family?
My feeling is that this is not a "or... or...." issue but an "and .... and...." issue. The state - which is all of us together -- is able to provide the material basis upon which the family is able to provide immaterial support. It is all about solidarity, interdependence, and seeking out the arrangement that is both most fair to all and most beneficent to all.
Peter Tack
I am fortunate to be living with my family at age 84. While I function for the activities of daily living, I do need some help. For those not so fortunate, there should be a safety net, proper and affordable home help, and in case of need decent nursing-home care. The government should provide this so that older people do not have to fear bankruptcy. For the past 15 years I have lived in Nova Scotia where my husband died in 1992.
A reader from Canada
Rosneath Farm is designed so that the first three and a half stages of increasing dependency as we age can be dealt with on-site by people (maybe not necessarily family) in the village. We plan to build a private care centre for that last stage, so that our people do not have to leave Rosneath to die. We plan to receive as much government support as is available, and staffing the centre will create another three or four jobs on site. We have a LETS system which is planned to have an hours component, so that people can build credits for hours of care that they need later in life. In Japan, this system operates over miles: I earn credits looking after an old person, and send them to my parents to obtain the care they need! Our focus is on the village - the community.
Warwick Rowell
Australia
It is first of all the responsibility of people to take care of themselves as much as possible. Secondly, it falls to the family. Third, to private charity. The state should be a distant fourth, but it should be there.
Stephen M. St. Onge
Minneapolis, Minnesota
As I have used a window situation to excuse myself from the social security scheme, my income consists of an annuity from a private insurer (in lieu of social security), a pension from my employer, and interest from investments. As you can see, I have used a legal opportunity based on higher income, which only existed for a short while, to be exempted from the German social security scheme for two reasons: (a) I did not want to depend for my likelihood on the government and its politics but preferred to provide for myself through private insurance; (b) I did not want to pay into the social security scheme contributions that were based on providing a likelihood for a family, spouse, and dependents, as I preferred to stay single. I am aware that this sounds selfish but the result has justified me.
I am aware that my situation cannot serve as a pattern for the population at large. Philosophically, I prefer the Swiss solution: One third Social Security, one third from the employer, one third from interest from savings as sources of income.
I am glad you give me the opportunity to express my views on this topic.
H. Detlef Luehrsen
Munich, Germany
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