Charity At Gunpoint
American Documents: The Social Security Act (1935)
2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. Find them all under the American Documents tab!
Subscribe to get these articles in your inbox. They’re free. Upgrade to paid and there will be additional perks, including essay subjects at your request.
Next week’s Electoral Brawlage will cover FDR’s first inaugural address, so we’ll get into that on Monday. This week’s document is the Social Security Act, which was passed by Congress in 1935 and implemented swiftly thereafter.
Like many of these congressional Acts, the SSA’s text mostly consists of the particulars and minutiae of its implementation and who qualifies for it. But first:
What is the SSA?
Social Security is a fund that gives “free” (heh) money to people the government determines are vulnerable and require assistance. Objectively, most of these groups are vulnerable and do need assistance—orphans, old widows, people with chronic or permanent medical limitations, injured veterans, etc. That’s exactly what makes the Act dangerous, because it’s baked into the recipe that you can’t run against it without running against vulnerable people. But we’ll get to that.
The Act is broken into twenty-one parts that outline the parameters of the fund, who gets it, how long it lasts, and how it is extended. Most of that is technical and arbitrary because the Act has been expanded, amended, and redirected several times in the last 90+ years, and the Administration has only grown, because it is a government institution and those never really get smaller.
Why did this happen?
Short answer, two parts: first, the Great Depression, which destroyed huge amounts of capital and wealth, and that poverty trickled down into the entire country. Even able-bodied men with valuable trade skills struggled to find work, so infirm grandmas and blind girls didn’t have a prayer.
Second: FDR’s presidency was riddled with communists and as Graham Bradley says, “Persistence is the Devil’s only virtue.” They wanted dependents, and putting a program like this into action would almost guarantee a permanent supply of them. Even a dependence program with noble ambitions from the start will be expanded by unscrupulous people and viciously defended by dishonest ones, until it consumes far more than it disperses. (You are here.)
What is it now?
There’s no doubt that the SSA does help people who probably wouldn’t get financial aide any other way, and do earnestly need it. I know multiple such people, ones I would provide for if I had the resources, but very few people can take on dozens of mouths to feed. The government “can” if money is fake and unlimited (see: Federal Reserve) but the bill always comes due for that sort of thing, and you’re seeing it now in the form of inflation (which is just one symptom of the problem.)
With Social Security in particular though, it pretends to be a program where part of your paycheck goes into a fund that grows via interest and disperses back to you when you turn 65 (which was, in 1932, far closer to the average age of mortality than it is now). Realistically, you’ve been paying for current retirees, and the politicians who benefit from keeping those people on the gravy train don’t think beyond the end of their current term. “Vote for me, I’ll protect your benefits, if you don’t vote for me the other guy will slash your benefits and then you’ll die homelessly of hunger so you’d better vote for me.” True or false, it is in fact hard to run against Santa Claus, so nobody ever gets to reform Social Security.
The system works if the underclass of contributing taxpayers grows endlessly, which it can’t, unless something dies, which is exactly what tumors do, and you’re going to hear that analogy from me a LOT because it is accurate. Doubtless you’ve seen the infographics that explain how that same amount of money placed into a garden variety private-sector index would yield a return roughly 6x greater than anything the government promises, meaning the SSA amounts to opportunity theft at the very least, but again: try to actually campaign against it and see what happens.
Bonus round: Graham’s Preference
Any diehard, rock-ribbed, sooper rightwing conservative guy will tell you that Social Security should be abolished, and I’ll say this: I agree with that as a matter of principle. We do not, however, live in a vacuum, and any EMT will tell you that when a patient has been stabbed in the abdomen with a Bowie knife, the solution to their woes is not to immediately rip it out.
Yes, the knife does not belong there. Nonetheless, it is there, and more damage will be done without a tactical removal.
In this case, the SSA needs to be drastically scaled back, reformed, and limited to those with a demonstrable need. Like any other form of government assistance it is rife with fraud and almost violently defended by its beneficiaries (some of who may even be right to do so. Again, I digress).
Good luck running on that, though. You will be lambasted by the (Democrat) opposition as trying to starve and kill grandma, etc etc. (This is not an exaggeration, the Dems did this to Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney in the early 2010s and it worked just as it was designed to.) The problem persists and you’re not allowed to run against it. If you’ve ever tried to intervene in the self-destructive behavior of a drug addict, you know what ultimately happens.
Conclusion
The Social Security Act shouldn’t be necessary but does remain the sole source of income for limited groups of people who otherwise would struggle to make ends meet. The problem for guys like me (25 years in the workforce, 25 more to retirement) is that it will physically implode before I ever get to draw a cent from it, making it the most egregious and flagrant form of taxational theft (redundant) to which I am currently subjected. It is the largest tax portion of every paycheck that I lose, and I get zero return from it.
Scale it back. Purge the recipient list of its unmerited leeches, and don’t tell me there aren’t any. The most immediate and fair fix would simply be to give workers the option to opt out of it. Stop taking from me. I don’t want me “returns” in 25 years no matter how much you swear they will be there (they won’t.) I’ll give you permission to flip me off and laugh in my mid-sixties if I ask for it, just stop taking it now.
You swear that it’s a fund accruing interest? That it’s not being raided and cashed out now? Live and die by that, then. Keep the last 25 years of my contributions. Free gift from me. Just don’t take any more.
We all know why you won’t.
Social Security is theft. End quote.
Visit Nauvoo Supply to order HEARTLANDERS, the most American novel I’ve ever written. It’s like if National Treasure happened during Fallout with G.I. Joes.
My Amazon page has my other books, including FOSSIL FORCE for young boys and Engines of Liberty for all ages.
I post several times per week on YouTube.
Subscribe here for more book reviews and for articles on what I continue to learn as I read.