Here’s a letter that I sent yesterday in response to an e-mail that I received:
22 June 2007
Ms. Clara Perez
www.democracyjournal.org
Dear Ms. Perez:
Thanks for your e-mail alerting me to Presidential-hopeful John Edwards’s proposal to create “a regulatory commission to protect consumers from dangerous financial products.”
If such a commission does its job, I suggest that the first dangerous financial product that it attacks be Social Security. Not only are Social Security’s returns lousy; not only are its “customers” never vested their “contributions”; not only does the institution providing it have no sound plan to keep it solvent; not only does this institution intentionally mislead its clients about its insolvency (witness its discussions of the illusory “trust fund”) – but its “customers” are forced to buy it. That is a dangerous financial product!
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
George Mason University
