A town too small to be good

Nationally and at the state level, some of the bad actors of politics and government are facing some consequences for verifiable and legally actionable corruption, as opposed to just batting away rumors and accusations in the shouting match that has kept us from enacting the sound, progressive policies that might actually create and maintain a pleasantly livable world for the children and grandchildren of those who decided to reproduce from the 1980s onward.

Little rays of hope shine into the gloom of the future. Will high profile criminals and traitors actually be indicted, tried, and convicted? Stay tuned. Will we actually start to deal with the climate crisis? Will we finally get an actual system of universal health care based on patient outcomes rather than corporate income? Will we go back to trying to accept each other's peculiarities rather than trying to eradicate them? Will we rein in rampant gun violence? Will we shine a light on corruption and waste where it actually occurs, rather than scapegoating social programs? It could happen. The US government and many state governments have strong enough constitutions and agencies to be able to enforce higher standards if the right people have the political will.

Some states are going the opposite way. The factions that have seized power are determined to hold it regardless of the naive notion of citizen government. But even there, a determined political opposition can maneuver against authoritarian takeover. They might even succeed. And states are big enough to attract national media attention. There are a lot of eyes on the big battles that define who we are as a nation.

Meanwhile, way down at the small town level, it's hard to find out what's going on. Here in New Hampshire, the state does little oversight of town governments. The smaller the town, the less money they have, and the less attention they attract. If corruption becomes the norm, no one will stop it if it becomes normalized. Cronyism, incompetent officials, revenge enforcement can go on unchecked because no one cares.

Correction: a minority of residents and voters cares, but small New England towns are direct democracies. Funny, that, because the conservative residents sneeringly tell you that "we live in a republic, not a democracy," and then go vote directly at town meeting on every issue, with absolutely no filter of elected representatives. Democracy, baby. In fact, it's damn near communistic. We all get together and decide how much money we need, compare it to how much money we actually have or can get, and figure out a budget.

You'd think it would be quite transparent, but town meeting is once a year. After that the select board and whatever professional town management you've scraped up the money for will be free to act autonomously, even exceeding budgeted amounts when a need is immediate. Sure, citizens can go to weekly select board meetings, but you have little leverage between elections. There is no debate among a regularly meeting body of legislators. The select board is all executive branch, with no checks and balances.

The winner of any election at this level is the person that gets the most votes. It is a pure popularity contest, like Prom King and Queen. If the majority of voters who show up prefers someone unqualified, or perhaps two or three of them in the course of a couple of elections, that's who will be running your town and setting your tax rate. It's a recipe for bad roads, environmental degradation, graft, and waste.

The American belief in the homespun common sense of country folk is generally complete bullshit. The same kinds of people tend to seek power at any level: the ones who see something in it for themselves and their friends. Where progressives try to broaden the basis of prosperity and acceptance to include more categories of minority, conservatives look out for their own people; the good people; the normal people; their kin and friends. And rural people are generally conservative.

It makes sense. People live closer to the real processes of survival in rural areas. They're more likely to have raised the animals that they later eat, or to have hunted a wild one, killed it, and prepared it for consumption. They raise crops, build and fix their own dwellings. The ones without generational wealth really do live close to that image of self reliance, insofar as anyone is self reliant. We all have to trade our skills or lend a hand, or get a hand, from time to time. A life like that makes a person calculate the cost and benefit of most actions. Unfortunately, at a governmental level -- even a dinky one like a town of a few hundred people without a true town center -- their calculations can lead to false economy, or to a few (thousand) bucks of town revenue going to a favored partner in an untraceable transaction.

It's not really untraceable. It's just that there is no real oversight unless enough townsfolk pay enough attention all the time, and still manage to overcome the loyalties of the close-knit group that benefits the most from keeping things vague and "good enough." In tiny towns, elections can come down to a single vote. Who are you going to complain to? First you have to untangle what happened. Then you have to make a case to have it investigated. At any level, your neighbors and your notoriously parsimonious state government will do their own cost benefit analysis and decide whether it's worth imperiling their own uneasy peace with neighbors or expending public funds to root out this one example of the kind of fiscal shenanigans that are probably found wherever you care to look.

I've lived here through an era of bad roads, no land use ordinances, and a really disgusting town trash dump. I saw it improve gradually. Now it's on the way down again. There's no one to tell, when even the rural news media know whose side they're on. The average citizen is just trying to earn a living and rest up from one work day to the next. We don't have time or resources to ride herd constantly on our public officials. I guess we're just really lucky that all of our town bridges are fairly new now, and none of the spans are very long. As for the rest of the roads, get ready for a bumpy ride. And don't be surprised at anything that gets built next door to you.

A Celebration of Death

People around me keep getting Covid. Business has been bad enough that I have not had to deal with crowds of people, so I haven't been overrun by hordes of mouth breathers, but I can't avoid all contact.

Recent sufferers all report rapid onset of symptoms from a very mild feeling of fatigue similar to what some of us feel much of the time anyway.

Since basically no one masks anymore, you have to decide whether to look like a freak. Meanwhile, we get even less information about the current symptoms and severity of the disease than we did at its height, when we got a fair amount more, but nowhere near enough. The response was forced to be 80 percent political and 20 percent scientific, so we did not have comprehensive data gathering and analysis to help us get the best understanding we could.

When everything shut down in March, 2020, we thought that our little bike shop was going to cease operation immediately, and maybe never return. Ours is a genuine small business, Forget fewer than 500 employees. We have fewer than five. But then we were declared essential, and a whole bunch of people suddenly wanted bikes that weren't there. So, then they wanted their old bikes refurbished. We were very busy, although we could hardly get basic repair parts, and certainly saw almost no new bikes. We relied on decades of experience and ingenuity to meet the demand.

The management took the pandemic seriously. We masked, put in air filters, put up barriers, and reconfigured service counters to control air flow and reduce contact with people. We imposed our protocols on customers, and lost a few as a result. I do not know how they fared against the disease itself, because we haven't seen them again. At least not so far. Sometimes people drift back in after years of nursing a grudge or just not needing our services.

Outside our windows we could see two establishments that did nothing to reduce risks. One was a church that ended up generating a cluster of infections. The other was a little sandwich shop. I was struck by the party atmosphere among the mingling, hugging, unmasked gatherings that I saw. On social media, this joyful defiance was even stronger. The advocates for normalcy at all costs seemed eager for the deaths that would come, some with a suicidal enthusiasm. The firm foundation of all of this was a bedrock of self-centeredness. The advocates of contagion held that the risk was fine because they themselves were fine with it. Anyone who wanted or needed to deal with them was forced to go out on that limb with them.

Now we're all out on the limb. The few who mask protect themselves and others, but masks are generally more protective of others, by filtering the breath of the wearer. In a sea of the maskless, the lonely mask is a leaky life raft.

We have incomplete information because most home tests go unreported. Even at the height of scrutiny we had incomplete information, and its distribution was hampered by political pressure. I get a general sense that most infections are much less severe, especially among vaccinated or previously infected people, but we still don't know about hidden or long-term effects of this new disease. It's also become a game of sorts, trying to deny the virus the victory of inflicting illness. By extension, the opponent is also anyone who has courted the disease and acted as its agent.

The problem is that the mask is not a secret weapon. You're putting it right out there, as plain as the filter on your face. In a public-contact business, that first impression influences everything that follows, as surely as ripping a loud fart, or choosing to wear politically provocative apparel. The mask is politically provocative apparel. Because it was made into a divisive issue from the beginning, it has had a stigma that only the mandates could overcome. Anyone who felt the need could say that they were wearing the mask because they were forced to. The rest of us could wear it without comment. It was the default, and naked faces were the outliers.

Masking helps reduce all infectious disease, but it's inconvenient and weird. It's isolating because it is an admission of concern and of possible contagion. It's more isolating when only one person in 30 or 50 is doing it. More people like to blend in than stand out. It's more comfortable to think that you can choose when and how to attract attention. This is a further burden on the decision whether to mask.

Once you get sick, you're sick. You can't dial it back. You're going to take that ride. It's automated. You don't know how long the track is or exactly how it is shaped. Either get out of the queue or prepare to get launched. You don't even know for certain if the restraints will keep you in your seat. Sure, life is full of uncertainties. You have to decide whether you'd like to add a few more and share them with a captive audience.

The stickiness of racism

 Someone posted a picture of Brazil nuts online the other day, as a test of racism, asking whether anyone used a certain term for them. Someone else I know posted a puzzled comment, because she didn't know the term. I, unfortunately, did. I knew right away what the original post was getting at.

I didn't grow up using the term. I was at least in my late 20s before I heard it. But it wedged itself into the jumble of other unnecessarily race-based terminology that had been common and socially acceptable among the people at whom it would never be leveled. A whole bunch of people who disapproved of lynching and would never burn a cross, who might even consider themselves color-blind in their egalitarianism would still chuckle at stereotyping jokes, and allow as how a much more flagrant racist was "entitled to their opinion."

With the expansion of civil rights came a wave of victim blaming that has helped keep racism viable for decades after the advances of the 1960s. "You can vote and go to the good schools now! It's all on you to catch up!" Black people in the media provided highly visible success stories, as well as wry commentary on the white world. Maybe the Black population really was sorting itself out according to its own desires, and we could all joke about our foibles.

Speaking of jokes, have you heard the one about the two Black guys who were told to lie down on top of a load of trash in a truck so it wouldn't blow out on the way to the dump? If you've heard it, it probably just auto-completed in your mind, whether you want it to or not. If you haven't heard it, you have to decide for yourself whether to accept it into your life. It's actually more of a redneck joke than a Black joke, but the punch line has the two rednecks who see the truck using the n-word, and it has the two Black guys in a job where they could be ordered to lie on top of a load of trash.

How about the joke about Black kids learning the alphabet? Or a commonly used derogatory term for improvised construction or mechanical assembly, which, in New England, might be referred to by the more laudatory "Yankee ingenuity?" Or a racist descriptive for an unhealthy selection of food and beverage from processed foods and soda pop as the morning meal?

My record on discarding and resisting these is scuffed and dented from collisions with their use. My transition has lasted since the 1970s. Prior to that I managed to be oblivious enough to the whole situation, as a dumb schoolkid in a lot of places where there simply wasn't much Black population -- sometimes none -- that it hadn't really come up. As soon as I did know about it, I approved of Black liberation in my little juvenile mind, and never changed that stance, no matter how ineptly I lived it. Meanwhile, the culture around me shifted away from blatant suppression and direct violence while it dished up plenty of separated equality, and terms of differentiation. Less visible to the white majority behind the public facade of Black advancement, separation and calculated inequality hollowed out the gains and kept racism thriving.

Guilt and fear drive white supremacy. They know damn well that this country owes a debt it can hardly repay, to the Black people who labored and the indigenous people who were shoved into undesirable corners, subject to extermination whenever they were deemed too inconvenient, so that the mythic greatness of America might rise. White labor was abused and exploited as well. That has contributed to poor white people resisting acknowledgement of the Black and indigenous claims for compensation, because the poor whites know that the rich will find a way to duck the bill and hand it off to people who can't afford to hire lawyers and buy judges and elected officials. Only through voting solidarity do we have the slightest chance of gaining leverage on government. It seems simple, but the concessions it will require from people who have prospered under the existing conditions almost guarantee that it will never happen.

Prove me wrong. The way will involve a few intermediate steps, but we never get anywhere if we don't all share the vision of where we need to end up.

More likely we go down in chaos and blood, because the defenders of the old ways are wedded to violence and willing to destroy everything if they can no longer control it. I don't prefer that, but I'd be remiss if I did not acknowledge it. It probably won't be the "race war" that some of them yearn for. We are at work on too many methods to destroy ourselves: environmental degradation, nationalist and religious militancy, criminal oligarchy, all of these actively erode the general welfare and domestic tranquility.

Knowing all of this, I still deal with the ugly crowd of racist epithets that pop into my mind whenever I see a Black person. These are terms that I never used in aggression, and never wanted to. They were just in the air, all around, and soaked in the same way repeated song lyrics do, as popular tunes go from Top 40 to Oldies, and never go away.

I often wonder what my thinking would be like if I had never been exposed to racism. What would my own brain come up with if it had not been loaded with terms and attitudes reflecting centuries of prejudice? I was probably in first grade when I started to learn that it was a big deal to see a Black person in a position of some authority and power. Instead of just other kids and adults in different skin tones, there was apparently a reason to differentiate, and I needed to have an opinion about that. On top of the basic academic stuff I had to absorb, and all of the other routine human aspects of growing up, I had to figure out the powers and responsibilities of inherited privilege, without feeling particularly privileged.

Not feeling particularly privileged, struggling white people push back hard and quickly against the concept. Racial identity was created by white people. It would have gone away if white people had been ready to accept Black people as fully equal fellow citizens back in the 1860s. Heck, I bet women still wouldn't have the vote if Black men had been given equal and unchallenged voting rights back then. Sexism crosses all color barriers. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's for damn sure a thing. When you imagine all the power that white people would have lost by granting full liberation to Blacks, think about what might have been gained in other precious realms of prejudice.

Lots of blood has been shed and lives have been destroyed trying to convince white men to lighten up. And maybe humans in general are so pig-headed that busting heads really was the only way to move forward. White men might -- for a very limited time -- have represented the least of all evils in our halting evolution into a truly enlightened species. But the iron fist always holds on for too long when a better way emerges. The fingers grip externally and in the mind, and need to be pried loose and melted down.

The Baby Boomers broke the system, but not the way you think

 While the Boomers are responsible for purposeful acts that made life more difficult for their own children and grandchildren, they started straining the machinery of civilization when they themselves were in school.

The Baby Boom -- as opposed to any birthrate surge known as a baby boom -- officially dates from 1947 to closing dates anywhere from 1960 to 1964. Within that span, the various waves had very different views of the world. The first wave for instance, could go to college, come out with a bachelor's degree, and slide into a good job that might support them for an entire career until retirement. Others might take a different kind of training and find good unionized jobs for similar career security. But the system that developed to process this younger generation was overwhelmed by their numbers by the late 1960s, as the middle of the boom choked the schools and then hit the job market. I was born in 1956. As I approached the end of high school, a bachelor's degree was still a decent ticket to employment. By the time I was in college, students who really wanted to get anywhere with academic credentials were planning for graduate school. And even with that, we had already heard the stories of "PhDs pumping gas."

To get a job, you have to find someone willing and able to pay you. Virtually every high-paying employer had their pick of highly qualified applicants by the mid 1970s, and more kept coming out of the pipeline. A need is not the same as a market. Areas that our species might have needed to work on were not attracting investors. The Boomers followed the money. Consumerism created or enhanced markets and ignored needs.

The Boomers had also grown up with the fantasy that unlimited wealth is not only possible, but okay. Some of us were oblivious and simply imagined stumbling into a fortune and being the cool kind of rich people, who are generous, open-minded, curious, fun, and conveniently well funded. Others were knowingly elitist and ruthlessly competitive, which is what it really takes to be wealthy. Hard work is a small percentage. Focused self interest is the larger part. Feel free to look down on the lowly grunts who merely labor. Maneuver against your peers and near peers, forming and breaking alliances as necessary. Game the system. Take every advantage as you find it. Sportsmanship is for losers.

The apparent prosperity of the 1980s was mostly based on credit and optimism. The recession that ended the decade hit when the bills finally went too far past due. The recovery that made us all feel good in the 1990s happened only because everyone had finally paid their cards down enough to start consuming again. And so we crashed in 2000. Every bad decision was multiplied by increasing numbers of players as the Boom begat Gen X and Gen X begat Gen Z, or however the succession goes. There's always overlap, so there are "generations" that are too young to have been sired by the one immediately ahead of them. But it's safe to say that Boomers stretched the credit and financial systems in the 1980s just as extensively as they had blown the seams on the educational system in the 1970s.

Ultimately, our problems are population problems. Our breeding success combines with our industrialized consumerism with devastating effect. This leads not only to products purposely designed to fail, it makes our own lives cheaper, as the impatient crowd in the queue behind us wants us out of their way.

War in Ukraine: Economics versus morality

 As the consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine continue to expand, major disruptions of food and energy supplies threaten economic stability across the developed world, and actual survival across the Global South. Areas that were under stress are now under much more stress. This will only get worse as the war drags on, and Russia refuses to back down from its unprovoked and immoral act of violence against a neighboring nation.

Vladimir Putin's greed for power drives the nation that he leads to act as his machine to sow chaos for the gain of a wealthy minority. Did Putin know that his forces would not have to sweep to easy victory in Ukraine to generate the leverage that he now enjoys? As long as the war lasts, Russia's power will only grow, because of the strategic importance of Ukraine as a food supplier, and Russia's position as a key player in the fossil fuel economy. The fossil fuel economy still has a choke hold on the world.

From a moral standpoint, the rest of the world should stand united in support of Ukraine against Russia's brutal war of conquest. From an economic standpoint, the rest of the world will see an almost immediate -- though temporary -- improvement in conditions by ceding Ukraine to Russia, perhaps even throwing support behind the old empire's second-rate military to help overrun Ukrainian resistance. As deplorable as Russia is, at least the rule of an authoritarian empire provides a single, known entity to build a strategy against. Think of how wonderfully simple everything seemed during the Cold War.

The United States has already suffered moral damage as our desperation for petroleum has driven us to make amends with Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration had made admirable efforts to recognize the abuses of the Saudi regime, for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and the war in Yemen. Now we are abandoning that stance and kissing up for oil. Stick a bigger flag on your pickup truck for that one.

What do you think? A long, expensive, bloody struggle lasting years and years to uphold the sovereignty of Ukraine and the continued rise of democracy in the world, or cheaper gas and food and shame that will follow us all the rest of our lives? Having chosen petroleum over virtue, those lives will be shorter in any case. The improvements really will only be temporary, as the climate finally goes out of control, and famine and drought envelop more and more of the earth's surface.

The climate collapse gains momentum in either scenario, as we neglect measures to mitigate it because our focus is on the delicate balance of a limited war with an erstwhile superpower or we hit the accelerator with our newly refueled big trucks and motorized toys. War is environmentally devastating, but our consumer version of peace and prosperity is also environmentally devastating.

The best answer would be for Russia to suddenly shake its head and back out of Ukraine with profuse apologies. That ain't happening. We have to figure out in a hurry whether the less worse prospect to reduce global threats is to throw Ukraine to the bears and deal with imperialist Russia or to ratchet up support for Ukraine's defense and hope that it drives Russia back to its borders sooner than later.

Why "gun control" is doomed

Humans have been losing their temper and killing their own kind since before we were humans. We just keep improving the technology.

The AR-15 was created to secure a military contract by providing a more effective weapon for the style of combat American troops were encountering in jungle and urban warfare. It was designed to kill not just people, but people reduced to the status of varmints in the underbrush: dehumanized humans.

Beginning with the American Civil War, mechanized slaughter in warfare started generating shocking numbers of casualties that were quickly rationalized and normalized by supporters of the conflict. Combatant deaths and collateral damage have always been accepted as part of the cost of the revered practice of war. We accepted that we will always have wars, so we'd better keep improving our weaponry to improve our odds of success.

The sale of personal guns reflects on an individual level the defense industry's sale of large-scale weapons to government military forces. Between nations, those arsenals present a deterrent to potential aggressors, or intimidate potential resisters to a powerful nation's overtures to a weaker one with deals that they can't refuse. The dynamic is different on a personal level, where some gun owners like to wear their firepower openly, while others prefer to take advantage of concealment. With an ample supply of guns in the United States, anyone who is fully clothed could have one or more weapons in easy reach. Thus, almost anyone you see could be an unstable dictator with nukes.

When the world entered the Nuclear Age, in which country after country developed doomsday bombs and missiles, we counted on the threat of mutually assured destruction to keep any single state actor from starting The Big One that would blow us back to the Stone Age. Indeed, research indicated that we would go farther than the Stone Age, to a nearly completely lifeless planet. As appealing as that may sound to nihilists who say that the destruction of our species and all other life sounds great, no one of that bent has yet succeeded in gaining enough control over a country with a nuclear arsenal to make the dream a reality.

On the individual level, the prospect looks completely different. How often do we hear that the instigator of a mass shooting either commits suicide or accepts that the armed response will kill him? Because the motives for mass shootings vary, some shooters do survive, or might have hoped to. But anyone initiating an act of slaughter has to accept the risk that it will end their story at the same time that it ends the lives of their victims. Mutually assured destruction isn't a deterrent, it's an enhancement.

A 2017 article from CNN provides a convenient history of the AR-15 and statistics on gun ownership in general. It reports that a 1999 Pew Research survey found that 50 percent of gun owners said that they owned theirs for hunting, and 26 percent said it was for protection. By 2017, 67 percent said they owned firearms for protection, and only 38 percent said it was for hunting. Put another way, the balance shifted from hunting animals to hunting each other. But the article also stated that gun ownership in the US had been steadily declining. The article is from 2017, with a graph showing data ending in 2014. That graph ends with a rising line indicating that could have continued to rise in the eight years since 2014. As with so many things, a lot can go unreported. Based on what I hear around my neighborhood on a regular basis, gun ownership is thriving.

Among my acquaintances I know heavily armed people and adamantly unarmed people. Because I'm not involved in shooting as a hobby or occupation, the subject comes up very little. I find a lot of helpful information and analysis at a YouTube channel  presented by a southern journalist who discusses this topic extensively.

According to more recent statistics reported in a BBC article, Americans use their guns to kill themselves more often than to kill others. But homicide is the next largest segment, followed by law enforcement, unintentional discharge (negligence), and uncategorized.

In the United States we are uniquely hampered by the Second Amendment when it comes to  restraining the supply and use of firearms. Other countries that supposedly provide examples of how easily it could be done with sufficient political will do not have the scriptural basis that the gun culture claims here. There is no "right to life" explicit in the Bill of Rights, but there is a right to the power of instant death.

Gun culture couldn't exist without guns. But guns already exist in huge numbers, leaving us to figure out how to address human attitudes toward them and their appropriate use. Bans promote sales. During the 1994-2004 ban, sales of the AR-15 and similar rifles increased. The rifles were simply reconfigured to comply with the wording of the ban. The prohibitions in the ban did little or nothing to reduce the lethality of the weapons, and absolutely nothing to stem the production of them or the demand for them. It created a scarcity mentality among people inclined to want a gun, and made them a sort of forbidden fruit that fed into anti-government rhetoric. True patriots stand up against their government, because you know we never really wanted or needed one in the first place, but back the blue and salute Old Glory and support our troops.

Mental health accounts for only a fraction of homicides. Human volatility combined with an implied challenge from popular culture makes people wonder all the time how they would stack up in a confrontation. The hero doesn't win every time, but they never quit. There is no distinct line between normal human violence and pathological expressions of it. Just by stepping onto the continuum you open yourself up to further experimentation. What would it be like? Could I take it? Is this my time to be the righteous fist of justice? Or maybe you're just pissed off that day.

Any time someone cites a progression of events in a conjectural way, the dive bombers of logical debate will descend in a swarm, shrieking "slippery slope fallacy! Slippery slope fallacy!" You know what? Fuck them. Slippery slopes exist, and the refusal to consider them as a thought experiment is intellectually dishonest and cowardly. One thing does lead to another. Not every progression proves true, but dismissing them out of hand because you learned, in some class you took or book you read, to scorn them shows an ironic lack of creative and critical thinking. As someone who has slid off of a number of them, I offer you my one-finger salute.

The problem with the political process is that we get buried in statistics and arguments from all sides, amplified or suppressed depending on where the lobbying money is being applied. There's a whole lot of rhetoric before the energy dissipates because everyone is too confused to move forward. If something does get enacted, its more likely to be ineffective political theater, because that's what the American people actually want. A simple and inadequate solution, or the attempt to impose one, is much easier for the public to understand than a data-driven, somewhat complicated long campaign to address the behavioral basis of our problem.

Your investment portfolio

 If you've made enough money during your working life to invest in a portfolio that will now support you in comfortable leisure in retirement, congratulations.

You don't need to be a major plutocrat to enjoy the advantages of the system that they have designed. Investment for profit is open to anyone who wants to buy in with whatever spare money they have lying around.

Many employers offer pension plans. At higher income levels, the pension can be a considerable inducement to take a job and do your best to hold onto it. Keep your eyes on the pot of gold waiting in the luminous fog of the future.

If your employer doesn't offer a plan, you can still shop around for a mutual fund, or piece together your own collection. Some people are good at this, or lucky. The more money you have, the more luck seems to find you. It isn't insider trading if it just comes up in social conversation, right?

However you collect your pile, remember that you are being supported by the labor of others. The higher your income during your career, the more you were paid with money that was denied to others. The income on your investments is almost entirely money that is denied to others still working. This does include the CEOs and other top management at profitable corporations, who have to sacrifice some of the profits to pay investors. It's all part of the game. They're well compensated enough for it to be a game for them.

Critics of Social Security complain, among other things, that retirees now are getting money put into the system by workers who have not yet retired. The active workers are subsidizing the retirees. But that's exactly how an investment-based retirement plan works as well. The money that private industry generates to pay a return on investment is made using their active labor force, or otherwise stressing the active labor force by laying a bunch of them off and buying back stock with the money saved on payroll.

The only way to save for retirement without relying on younger people to pay your way is to hoard gold, and hope that it still has value by the time you try to trade your nuggets and ingots for the real necessities.