The President's Anti-Libertarian Social Security Reform

New YDN column, on why the Bush Soc. Sec. proposal is a betrayal of, among other things, libertarianism:

Mr. Bush's proposed privatization of Social Security -- "privatization" is what Republicans called the idea last year, even if they employ the weasel word "personalization" today -- neither lifts a burden off the backs of workers nor increases their economic freedom. Instead, the president is suggesting abandoning a program in which current workers support current retirees by funding investment in government bonds, in favor of a program in which the government seizes a functionally equivalent portion of incomes through payroll taxes; chooses a more diverse investment pattern for such monies; and then gives them back to workers in small regular annuities upon their retirements. If there is an important moral difference between the government using your money to pay benefits to others, versus the government taking your money now in order to give it back to you much later in a manner and according to a schedule which it deems appropriate, I confess I am unable to see what that might be.

UPDATE: Is it really possible that the advocates of privatization haven't thought through some of the most obvious problems and pitfalls of their proposal? I think it might be. Matt Yglesias explains:

The rank-and-file are deferring to talk radio hosts and the like who are, in turn, deferring to more highbrow pundits...The pundits think they're deferring to a bunch of trusted experts somewhere who've run the numbers. But it turns out that no one has run the numbers. It's a systemic breakdown throughout the movement with regard to the single largest program the federal government runs.