Retiring

THE AMERICAN DREAM is....what? Owning a house? Sending the kids to college? Owning your own business? How about retirement? How about retiring from all gainful employment well before the end of life, in order to enjoy the last years of life without the burden of employment? Of all the above, retirement is the most recently established American dream. In fact, retirement is among the most recent sociological inventions of western civilization. When Otto von Bismarck unified Germany in 1870 by establishing Prussian suzzerainty over all the other German states,(and attacking France), he established a new German military and civil bureaucracy, and included as an incentive the promise of retirement at age sixty five, with a government pension, as a means of attracting interest in public service and stabilizing the newly formed German nation. Stories about how he chose sixty five as the retirement age have assumed near mythic proportsion among European historians; the most widely accepted story is that he drew the number out of a hat, or maybe out of one of those cool Prussian helmets with the big spike on top. Probably just a myth, Bismarck was far more methodial than that. The most probable explanation is that he realized that by age sixty five, a good many people will be dead or close to it, but that enough people plan to live that long to make pensioned retirement a reasonable possibility. Bismarck knew better than to promise too much too soon, or too little too late. He must've done it just right, because the age of sixty five has been accepted ever since as a good retirement marker. Retirement was not entirely unknown in America. Benjamin franklin was so smart and industrious that he retired from his publishing business at forty, and John D. Rockefeller the first retired at forty in the late eighteen seventies, and devoted the rest of his long life to various personal interests. But for the toiling masses, retirement came to American only in the nineteen thirties, with the enactment of social security. Social security was intended, we all know, only as old age assistance; retirement was left up to the individual, but with social security millions of Americans could see that, with a little personal saving and some good luck, they could indeed afford to take their senior years off. Bismarck's system worked quite well, and so did social security, until soo many piglets showed up at the hog trough, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln. The federal government has repeatedly raided the social security trust fund, the American economy has been in decline, it can be argued, since the early nineteen seventies, and predictably, we are now forced to rsie the retirement age, ever higher, for each younger generation. In the United States, with a populatin of threehundred and twenty million, about sixty million Americans, one fifth of the population, is receiving some form of social security pay out. This is not sustainable. Anyone born today might not be able to draw social security until the age of eighty, if ever. Retirement still has not come to much of the world; perhaps it never will. The global birth rate is declining, people are living longer. The human race is approaching a situation in which there will be billions of elderly retired, and a smaller population of working age people. we cannot all be retired at the same time. When social security was enacted in 1935, there wre over thirty workers to support each retired person with social security payments. Now its down to something like three to one, and it keeps shrinking. Something has to give, sometime. It may eventuate that retirement evolves out of existence, except for the truly self sufficient, for those who have saved enough on their own, aside from social security. If social security fails, it was, at least, a noble and humane experiment.