"Jonathan Ganz" wrote

Oh, now I see. Your argument is with FDR. Ok. Thanks anyway.

It's prolly too complicated for here but I'll try. "Capitalists" buy
machines that allow workers to create more goods that workers and others buy
with their wages creating profit that encourages capitalists to buy machines
.... in a never ending cycle. That's capitalism. However advancing technology
creates ever more efficient machines that need fewer workers to make more
and better goods until, eventually, we can envision machines that make
everything without human labor. This doesn't happen smoothly. An economy
adjusts to one level of technology and enjoys a boom, but then a new level
come and people get laid off and there is a bust until the economy adapt ...
etc. But with every advance, fewer workers are needed to produce goods, so
there are fewer wages to buy these goods and everybody suffers until the new
unemployed find jobs outside the factories (sounding familiar).

Social security was intended to take older people out of the work force to
make room for those who needed jobs the most - the young folks raising
families - yet at the same time give them enough money to buy products and
keep the system working. Similarly, eduction is used to delay kids entering
the work force by keeping them in school longer. My grandmother had learned
math thru Calc 101 when she finished the 8th grade, ready to teach high
school herself. It's no accident that a HS math teacher now needs 9 more
years to qualify.

And who pays for all this? Why the beneficiaries of course: the people with
jobs and the employers making the profits.

That's great, so long as the employers and workers far outnumber the school
kids and retirees but that ratio has been steadily shrinking. So far the
gummymint has kept it working by bandaids but those won't last forever and
encouraging geezers to work longer defeats the very purpose of social
security - to get us out of the workforce to make room for the young.

Now, the end looms. What to do when somebody invents factories that make
everything without any workers, 'cuz without workers there's no real wages
and without wages there's no sales and without sales there's no profits and
capitalism collapses! Yes, that's oversimplistic, but we do need to think
about alternative ways to finance these factories and distribute goods.
Communism was to be one answer. It has proven a sorry one not only in terms
of the kinds of government it yielded but in the poor quality and
distribution of goods it provided. So, y'all young-un's out there otto
start thinking about the big picture, not just Social Security.

That's obviously beyond our current president ....