PRIVATE RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS WIN BY DEFAULT.

There's a lengthy, by InstaPundit standards, discussion of The Paternalistic Impulse.  "See, the thing is, some people say that people aren’t clever enough to plan for their own retirement. But what makes anyone believe that people can then be clever enough to plan for other people’s retirements?"  That's long been a Cold Spring Shops theme.  (So long, in fact, that some of the links in those posts are probably dead.)

Call the roll: we have the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation as government insurance against managers of private pension funds putting all the money into one company's stock, or using the pension money as a piggy-bank.  That's exactly what Congress has been doing with the "Social" "Security" "Trust Fund" for these many years.  In Illinois, the legislature has been writing IOUs to the various state employee pension funds, so as to secure resources for their pet projects, and those IOUs have become more and more suspect.

The discussion at InstaPundit concludes, "As I say, if people are too dumb to plan for their own retirements, they’re probably too dumb to plan for other people’s, too. And certainly there’s no evidence that the folks in Washington are any less dumb than the public at large."

When you have eliminated the impossible ...