It is more than 30 years since I first attended a conference on the global welfare crisis. Rarely have a few months passed without an invitation to another. Last week, Tom Palmer, the American libertarian, came to London to denounce the “world-straddling engine of theft, degradation, manipulation and social control we call the welfare state”.
The content of these rants is familiar. Levels of welfare provision are unaffordable; government finance is a huge Ponzi scheme. A common conclusion is to provide an estimate of the discounted value of the cost of some hated item of government expenditure if its current provision were continued into the indefinite future. Mr Palmer reported that the present value of unfunded liabilities of US medicine and social security is $137tn.
Social security is a means of intergenerational transfer. The only bread fit to eat is bread baked today: but why should today’s bakers feed the retired bakers of yesteryear? Why should we look after old people, who can no longer do anything for us?