Slate: The Hassle Factor - But I don't want to manage my own Social Security account!

Now here's something truly disgusting. Executive summary: according to this Slate pundit, we should leave alone the creaking, crumbling Ponzi scheme known as Social Security, forcing generation after generation to toss an ever-expanding share of its wages down the rat-hole of collectivism, leaving bupkes for their children to inherit and earning a rate of return that would get any financial manager fired for incompetence or arrested for fraud. And we should do this because the alternative--actual ownership of one's own retirement account--is too much work for some people. Let alone that there are simple passbook-style accounts that would do the job for them and still earn a substantial multiple of Social Security's returns and leave a tidy sum to pass on to one's heirs-- no, you and I and everyone else should be forced to endure the current system because a few people are lame and lazy and want a Federal nanny to tuck them in at night.

"...Millions of Americans, I'm convinced, are against [Bush's Social Security reform proposals] for only [one] reason. We don't want to have to think about Social Security. 'But people worry about it now,' you might say. Oh, sure, at these presidential drop-in discussions in Fargo, N.D., a cop or cook will say, 'I worry Social Security won't be there for me.' But come on, they don't really worry. If they did, they'd open a damned savings account.

In real life, we ignore our Social Security. That's the glory of it. We have the freedom not to think about it. With all the time I have not to think about my 'private' account, I can turn on the Cubs game. Or open up Kafka.

I can even pray, if I want.

Privatization is one more damn thing to distract and upset me..."

The answer to this infuriating mental midgetry is so simple I'm surprised no conservative or libertarian pundits have picked up on it. I've already mentioned it: under Social Security, when you die your Social Security account dies with you. Your kids inherit nothing. And there's the key to selling Bush's reform: Let's do it for the children. Won't somebody please think of the children?