retirement PPS

I said in my last post that, to a first approximation, if you want to consume value you need to produce some value first.

Of course some people can not manage to create enough value for others in order to get the things we collectively think they should have.  Through some linear combination of factors which are their fault and those that aren't, they do not produce enough value to account for the value they want to consume.

We tend to spend a lot of energy arguing about how to get those people those valuable things and how much value they should get. I think that skips right over the real questions: why can't they create value on their own? On the implementation side: how can we help them create more value?

That's the way things ought to be framed, not just for this pension debate, but for minimum wage and health care and all sorts of other things. It's one thing to say "this guy is only creating $6/hr worth of wealth, but we want to make the minimum wage $10: good idea or bad idea?" It's another to ask why an hour of his time is only worth six bucks. How can he or we make sixty minutes of his time more productive?

Then there's the related issue: we don't really care how many dollars this guy takes home, we care about what he can get for them. So trying to artificially raise his salary not only ignores his actual production of resources by masking signals, it ignores the consumption of resources that's the goal. Question Two needs to be: how can we get people the things they want while using up the less valuable resources? Trying to drive down the cost of consumption goods has the same moral goal as trying to drive up the value of labor.