“Rather than letting gabillionaires like Elon Musk put practically none of their massive incomes into” Social Security, Jim Hightower writes at CounterPunch, “make them pay Social Security taxes exactly like regular workers do.”

As is always nearly the case when discussing Social Security, there’s quite a bit to unpack, but let’s start by congratulating Hightower on the fulfillment of his wish, long before he even expressed it:

Elon Musk DOES pay Social Security exactly like regular workers do.

Regular workers pay 12.4% — half directly and half theoretically from their employers, but thereby reducing the money available for wages —  in Social Security tax on every dollar of income they earn up to $176,000.

Elon Musk (and other “gabillionaires”)  also pay 12.4% in Social Security tax on every dollar of income they earn up to $176,000.

$176,000 isn’t the only Social Security “cap.” There’s also a maximum benefit amount. Elon Musk (and other “gabillionaires”), just like regular workers, can potentially receive a maximum monthly payout of $5,108  if they wait until the age of 70 to retire.

Hightower doesn’t really want to treat Elon Musk just like a regular worker. He wants Musk to pay more, without receiving a  commensurate increase in return, so as to subsidize the retirements of those regular workers.

He wants, in the common parlance, to “redistribute wealth,” in the form of retirement income.

Social Security already does that, but in a different direction: It forces black men to subsidize the retirements of white women.

The average life expectancy of a black man in America is 68 years, which means that the black man who doesn’t retire early receives a whopping one year of Social Security checks before shuffling off this mortal coil. Kind of a raw deal, huh?

The average life expectancy of a white woman in America is 81.1 years, which means that even the white woman who works to the maximum retirement age of 70 receives more than 11 years of those payments. Sweet deal, huh?

To add insult to injury, the labor participation rate of white women is lower than that of black men — in part because our culture still encourages “one-income households” after marriage with the man as “breadwinner” — so white women work fewer years before retirement, but enjoy more years after retirement, at the financial expense of black men.

If Hightower merely suggested reversing the flow of wealth redistribution — from bottom-up to top-down — I’d still call shenanigans, but he instead characterizes the Social Security Ponzi scheme as “an egalitarian effort to provide a decent retirement for all,” which it isn’t now and never has been.

The best thing to do with Social Security, if “decent retirements” is the goal — and, more importantly, if individual freedom and choice are the criteria — is eliminate it.

“Regular workers” and their households earn an average annual return on their involuntary Social Security “investment” of 1.23%. Actually investing that 12.4% of income in an S&P 500 indexed mutual fund produces an average annual return of 10%.

Instead of taxing the “gabillionaires” more, tax everyone at 0% and let the market make them prosperous.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Medicine today is a business enterprise,” Dr. Joseph Varon writes at the Brownstone Institute. “Patients are consumers, doctors are ‘providers,’ and healing has been crowded out by billing codes, liability fears, and the suffocating weight of bureaucracy. The vocation has been replaced by a job, and a job can always be abandoned.”

In case you didn’t catch the tone, yes, Dr. Varon bemoans healthcare  traded as a “commodity” rather than delivered as a quasi-priestly “vocation.”

A young socialist-minded acquaintance of mine puts it more plainly. “Healthcare shouldn’t be a commodity,” she says. “Everyone needs it. Without it, people die.” And of course the whole socialist premise is based on opposition to the “commodification of labor” in general.

For any good or service, there are two alternatives to commodification:

First, do without that thing. In a world where doctors and other health practitioners do their work just because they love it, subsisting on whatever alms grateful patients happen to throw their way, the number of healthcare workers available will dwindle, not grow. More people will receive less care. More people will die younger.

Second, enslave those who can provide that thing and force them to provide it. The most obvious problem with that is the moral implication. Slavery is wrong. It’s wrong if you expect the slaves to pick cotton, and it’s wrong if you expect the slaves to perform surgery. A nearly as obvious problem is that slaves tend to care less about, and put in less effort to achieve, positive results from their forced labor. Would YOU hand a slave a scalpel and demand a heart bypass?

The evolution of money boosted humanity from a barter economy in which, if I had a cow and needed an appendectomy, I had to find a doctor who wanted a cow, to an exchange economy in which goods and services could be commodified and traded indirectly but easily.

Without large-scale commodification and money as medium of exchange, we’d all be — and once were — much, much poorer than we are now, even if enterprises were “worker-owned.” Healthcare workers would still have to eat, even if they were outright slaves. And if they weren’t, their collectives would spend a lot more time trading medicines, stitches, casts, etc. for chickens, goats, and shingles for the roofs of their little shacks and a lot less time actually practicing their “vocations.”

If there’s a down side to commodification, it’s that an exchange economy makes it easier for governments to extort a portion of our economic production from us as taxes, then spend it. Instead of X bushels of grain or Y gallons of milk in “in-kind” taxes that have to be further bartered, they just grab Z dollars out of our wallets.

Taxation, of course, is something we should eliminate, along with the gangs that practice it. But that’s a subject for another column. The point here is that we owe everything above our barest subsistence, and maybe even that, to “commodification” of healthcare and everything else.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Military leaders have raised serious concerns about the Trump administration’s forthcoming defense strategy,” the Washington Post reports. “The critiques from multiple top officers … come as [US defense secretary Pete] Hegseth reorders U.S. military priorities — centering the Pentagon on perceived threats to the homeland, narrowing U.S. competition with China, and downplaying America’s role in Europe and Africa.”

I’m writing this on the morning of, and you’ll presumably read it after, a meeting Hegseth and Trump have called with the US military’s general and flag officers, supposedly to harangue them about something called the “warrior ethos,” which mostly seems to involve endorsing, and unquestioningly executing orders to commit, war crimes rather than prosecuting such crimes.

Hopefully the meeting will instead be dedicated to explaining three facts of reality to those generals and admirals.

Fact #1:  Any “national defense strategy” that’s actually about national defense would indeed involve “centering the Pentagon on perceived threats to the homeland, narrowing U.S. competition with China, and downplaying America’s role in Europe and Africa.”

Fact #2: In a time of massive government deficits and debt, re-centering “national defense strategy” on, you know, “national defense” instead of constant, dangerous, and expensive military adventurism around the globe makes financial sense. Current US “defense” spending  officially hovers at just below, and likely actually exceeds, $1 trillion per year. Cutting that by 80-90% would still provide a robust “national defense,” while reducing the economic damage government spending in general does to the people living in the nation in question.

Fact #3: The military is the employee, not the employer. It’s not a general’s or an admiral’s job to define the overall “national defense strategy.” It’s a general or admiral’s job to execute the lawful orders he’s given by the civilian government.

For the most part, Trump, Hegseth, and US military leaders openly disdain the “lawful” part of Fact #3 … but the proposed “national defense strategy,” if it’s as described, would tend to reduce opportunities for lawless military conduct. Fewer troops in fewer places would have fewer opportunities to commit (or be ordered to commit) war crimes.

Unfortunately, it’s probably not as described. We almost certainly won’t see the cuts in military spending or the reductions in foreign adventurism the description implies.

“Mission inflation” lobbying from both military commanders and corporate welfare queens dependent on large weapons orders and other military contracts may have to change things up, but they’ll find ways to keep their gravy trains on the rails.

On the civilian government side, foreign entanglements are go-to excuses for more of the taxing, borrowing, and spending politicians love, and also provide useful distractions from domestic policy failures and popular discontent.

The only way to get the US Department of Defense (or is it War now?) out of our wallets and off our necks is to discard the idea of political government itself. We should treat Washington, DC the way the Scipio Africanus the Younger treated Carthage.

But meanwhile, we should welcome even the slightest reorientation of US military policy toward “national defense” rather than foreign meddling.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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