Bargaining For Love

[LPH]

Bargaining for a Child’s Love suggests ideals of privatized retirement plans are too rosy and disregard reality. For example, the author provides a story summarizing a 1904 New Jersey court case.

According to witnesses, the father’s syphilis had eroded his capacity to conduct business. He was not insane or incompetent, but he was increasingly deaf and uninterested in the world. According to one son, his father had become “cranky and hard to get along with, and he would go into the stable and flog the horses until the neighbors would interfere.” He was “drowsy and sleepy all the time.” He was gluttonous and depressed and didn’t clean himself, the son remembered; the family “had to force him to wash himself, he was so dirty.” The other son recalled that Ella had difficulty “getting him to change his underwear.”

Keep reading the full opinion piece.

 

[Robert Heiny]

Yes, that's one view of privatized retirement. It's a noble effort to appeal to guilt in order to change choices available to other people.

At the same time, I worked with people as they arranged wills, insurance, trusts, etc. and also made gifts to social welfare programs. These were privately arranged plans without relying on public funding.

In both cases, one public policy does not solve the problems described in the NYT, but one policy as implied by that writer could restrict what some people can do with their assets.