{"id":1563,"date":"2009-12-18T18:49:38","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T23:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=1563"},"modified":"2009-12-18T18:54:40","modified_gmt":"2009-12-18T23:54:40","slug":"refuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=1563","title":{"rendered":"refuse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes folks, this man has won a Nobel Prize<\/a>. Which is further proof (as if any was needed) that the award is absolutely useless as an indicator of actual merit:<\/p>\n

Bear in mind also the lessons of history: social insurance programs tend to start out highly imperfect and incomplete, but get better and more comprehensive as the years go by. […] [Social Security] was improved over time, and it\u2019s now the bedrock of retirement stability for the vast majority of Americans.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s the biggest load of garbage I’ve read in a long<\/em> time. I’d like to put him in a room with Thomas Sowell<\/a> for 15 minutes and see what happens. My hunch is that he’d reemerge a whimpering, sobbing shell of the man he used to be.<\/p>\n

I don’t even know where to start. There are so many liberal euphemisms and redefinitions that it’s almost like all of those have to be cleared out before one can start dismantling the meat of the matter. Just to take the part I quoted, though—if this man had any grasp of actual history, he’d realize that every “social insurance program” has either failed spectacularly in the long run or has morphed and grown (Krugman: “[gotten] better and more comprehensive”) into either a welfare system that destroys personal initiative or some form of totalitarian state that realized that if a little control over people’s lives was nice, a lot was even better. I wonder if Soviet Russia would have defined any of their efforts as “social insurance programs.” It sounds like something we’d hear from the lips of Kim Jong-Il (whose country is neither democratic, nor of the people, nor a republic).<\/p>\n

And if Social Security is “the bedrock of retirement stability for the vast majority of Americans,” we’re in serious trouble. Any individual (not just any economist) who has worked their way into at least the lower middle class has a pretty good notion that to rely on Social Security to provide for them in retirement would be the biggest mistake of their financial lives. The system’s going to go bankrupt in a matter of years, and even if it weren’t, the eventual payouts would generate the kind of standard of living that would make the Projects seem like luxury condos.<\/p>\n

Unbelievable that this kind of tripe is allowed to be taken seriously in this country. The Gray Lady fell out of my good graces long ago, and this just reconfirms the status quo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes folks, this man has won a Nobel Prize. Which is further proof (as if any was needed) that the award is absolutely useless as an indicator of actual merit: Bear in mind also the lessons of history: social insurance programs tend to start out highly imperfect and incomplete, but get better and more comprehensive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[40,31],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1563"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1566,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563\/revisions\/1566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}