How to Eliminate Social Security and Medicare

Ralph Raico writes:

How to Eliminate Social Security and Medicare Expenditures under the Social Security and Medicare programs account for approximately one-third of total federal government spending. It is obvious that any major reduction in government spending requires major reductions in spending for these programs. Unfortunately, Social Security and Medicare are generally regarded as sacred and thus virtually untouchable, with the result that few if any proposals have been made that would greatly reduce the spending they entail... This program will undoubtedly seem much too slow for some supporters of individual rights and freedom. Nevertheless, I believe that it is in fact the most rapid means of achieving its ultimate goal that does not entail a revolutionary overthrow of what have come to be established rights in the law, however wrongheaded the law has been in establishing those rights in the first place. Proceeding in this way is an essential aspect of liberalism in its classical sense. Fundamentally, rights to entitlements of any kind, that must be paid for involuntarily by other people, are no more legitimate than the alleged property rights of slave owners in their slaves. Yet to avoid civil war, liberalism would have urged a policy of compensated emancipation rather than one of violent emancipation. Today, in fundamentally similar circumstances, liberalism must limit as far as possible the disturbance that would otherwise be caused by the elimination of illegitimate, perverted rights... If we want to protect the value of individual human life, particularly in old age, when it is most vulnerable, we must reverse direction and start dismantling Social Security and Medicare, two potentially deadly collectivist institutions. We must restore to the individual the responsibility and the power to determine his own future through forethought and saving. The individual must have his own individual property with the freedom to use it for his own well-being, as he sees fit. Government officials must be barred from the process. source