I agree with Paul in that private accounts have nothing to do with solvency and solvency is the issue. I disagree with Paul because I think private accounts a terrific policy and that in the information age, you're going to need different kinds of structures in the entitlement area than you had in the industrial age.

Josh is doing his level best to enter into a rational debate with Klein on the subject of what, exactly, Klein thinks an "information-age" retirement benefit might look like—to the extent of asking TPM readers to provide him with anything in Klein's written work that explains the argument here. But this is lost labor, and Josh is too polite.

I'm less polite, so I'll just say it: Joe Klein is a fuckwit. Josh isn't going to find an argument, because an argument is the product of thought, and this is just sloganeering—moronic sloganeering at that. Putting "information age" and "Social Security" together like this bears the exact relation to intellectual activity that a crow collecting shiny things bears to sculpting.

But since I briefly thought about taking Josh up on his reader challenge, I'll just note where this meme may have entered Klein's system, as if virally: from that star collector-of-shiny-bits of the advanced punditry, David Brooks. Here he is, way back in 2002, in a Slate "Breakfast Table" exchange with Klein, making hay out of the Enron collapse:

The Enron executives, who professed a love of free market capitalism, kept their love pure by never applying it. They are the enemies of the free market. If, as you say, the Republicans decide that their real allies in this are the plutocrats, then they are going to destroy themselves. But if they decide their real duty is to protect free competition, then they have a big progressive-conservative agenda ahead of them, which will be widely popular and could recast domestic politics. ...

If the Republicans can clean up the information-age economy so that people have faith in it, then privatizing Social Security will be easy.

One gets the impression that Joe Klein heard the phrase "information age" sometime in the early '90s and it scarred him for life. Every time he uses it now he feels like he's a real interlectual, surfing right out on the edge of history. Give Brooks credit, he knew just how to bait the hook. His abilities as a prognosticator, on the other hand? ... But I'm sure that "widely popular progressive-conservative agenda" is gonna emerge any day now, and just utterly transform the Social Security debate.

posted by michael  5:04:06 PM  
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