October 18, 2004

When I was young and naive and thought the saying, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you" didn't mean the exact opposite of what it says, I really thought my Social Security went into a little account with my name on it. Like there was a bank at some government building in Washington, DC, with a name like "The Social Security Bank," and there was a box for me that they put my money in, and when I retired the government would mail me a monthly check for thousands of dollars, which of course would support me in my daily round of Putt Putt golf on my personal Putt Putt golf course on my yacht, while I cruised up and down the coast.

Ha ha! Instead, when I got wised up, I found the money they were taking from me weekly was being sent out as fast as the government could send it, to support all those retirees who had come out on the other end of the Geezifier. In other words, my little box didn't exist, and it was empty anyway! So I could forget about my yacht, and definitely about the Putt Putt golf, unless I wanted to bury an empty dog-food can in the ground like I did when I was a kid, and knock a beat-up golf ball into it with a tree branch.

It didn't matter if the cootified were collecting their Social Security checks on their yachts, on which I had never been even once, and would probably be tossed off if I ever snuck on, the way Goldie Hawn pushed Kurt Russell off in Overboard, and then threw his toolbox in after him. It didn't matter if they gave out more in tips a week than I made in a year. The money I sent in was being sent straight out to them. It was like I was putting my money into a big long pipe and it was rolling down it into the pockets of some old guy in Miami wearing Bermuda shorts and black shoes with white socks pulled up to his kneecaps. And what you're going to hear if any of them complain about not getting enough of my money for their retirement is, "The government will get the money from somewhere AWWWWCK!" because I am going to grab them by their polyester Hawaiian shirts and shake them so hard their dentures will pop out of their mouths with their stogie still clenched between the teeth.

Heck, it would have been a lot easier if I took my paycheck from delivering pizzas in college and just gave it to my Mom and Dad. Not only did I have to put up for years with my Mom waking me up Saturday and Sunday morning, after a hard night of learning to mix Annie Green Springs wine and Budweiser, by banging her vacuum cleaner against my bed frame, I now had to support them, even though I was living on burned pizza that couldn't be sent out to customers because somebody (I won't say who) had left it in the oven too long and it had turned black.

Well, heck, if my nonexistent Social Security box was empty, then how was I supposed to get money for my retirement? Well, I was told, when I was 75 there would be lots of college students delivering pizzas and sending me their money. And when they retired another generation of pizza deliverers would send them their money. And this was supposed to go on for hundreds of years, generation after generation of current pizza deliverers sending their money to retired pizza guys. I decided it'd be easier if the pizza deliverers just drove by and threw a pizza in the dumpster, which is where I'm sure I'll be living after I've retired.

Now I suppose this would work just fine if there was an ever-expanding workforce of pizza makers and hamburger flippers. But I saw a flaw in this. If the government keeps raising taxes and regulating the economy, by the time I retired there would be exactly one Pizza Pie Heaven left in the entire United States, and the feds would be trying to extract billions of dollars from it to support me in my geezerdom. That's why I figure I'll be living in a dumpster, along with three other guys, all of us sharing an empty pizza box as a blanket.

I suppose none of this matters anyway, what with global cooling. No, wait, I mean global warming. Global cooling is what was supposed to happen to us back in the '70s. Somebody changed their minds somewhere! And then there's the hole in the ozone layer. I forgot what caused it, though. Cows with lots of gas, I think. Pizza'll do that, especially to cows.

I figure I'm not going to get any Social Security at all, because the whole thing is going to blow up like a frog with a firecracker in it. And if I do, what with inflation, I'll probably get about $1.98 a week, which I guess I can trade for a leftover burned pizza. Living in a dumpster with three guys, not having any money, and eating burned pizza. It'll be just like I never left college.

Lew Rockwell See Bob's archives there.

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