Keeping the Faith: American Values and Social Security

 Why Should We Have Social Security?

Why should we have Social Security or any other public pension system. Why do we feel in our hearts that it would be wrong to allow our old people to starve in penury? Why do we feel that we must uphold our commitment to provide benefits that people have worked for all of their lives? And how is any of this connected to the meaning of being American?

We should do these things because we want to live in a just and democratic society, and because we know that justice and democracy are closely connected. We know that we cannot have democracy without justice because an unjust society is inevitably unstable, and we know that we cannot have justice without democracy, either. The founders of our country also knew these things, and they wrote their understanding into the Preamble to our Constitution, which says,

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Our Government Must Establish Justice

What does it mean to establish justice? What did "justice" mean to the founders of our country? Clearly, they were not referring narrowly to legal justice in the sense of fair and open trials. If that had been their purpose, they would not have needed to reform their government from top to bottom as the Constitution did.

They were referring to justice in a much broader sense. They were referring to what we now call “social justice.” They wanted a society in which the comfort of the few did not depend on the suffering of the many. They wanted a society with a broad middle class living a secure and prosperous life. They did not object to the wealth of the few, but they insisted that it should not be based on the suffering of the many. This view of social justice is a basic American value, and it is widely shared to this day.

Our Government Must Insure Domestic Tranquility

In the view of the founders, a society that lacked social justice would be plagued by social unrest and endemic conflict. Only a reasonably just society could be peaceful and stable. We continue to share this view, and its truth may be seen in the history of our most important failure. The founders were unable to eliminate slavery from our country, and the result has been not only a bitter Civil War but also an entrenched social conflict that has plagued us throughout our history.

Domestic tranquility is also important because without it, our basic rights become endangered. In our Declaration of Independence, the founders said, 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In a society that is full of conflict, life and liberty are endangered, and the pursuit of happiness become very difficult. Thus, we Americans believe that we cannot insure our basic, unalienable rights without domestic tranquility, and we cannot have domestic tranquility without social justice. This belief lies at the core of what it means to be American.

Our Government Must Promote the General Welfare

The Preamble to the Constitution shows that the founders believed that one of the purposes of government was to promote the welfare of the people. They understood that without appropriate management and direction, a society may create wealth in a way that impoverishes the people rather than enriching them. The founders saw that a just and tranquil society might not maintain itself automatically. They saw that new circumstances might require new actions on the part of government. So, they articulated a positive duty to promote the general welfare. This, too, is a basic American value, and at various times our government has acted to promote the general welfare in ways that the founders could not have foreseen. Examples include Abraham Lincoln’s establishment of the land grant colleges, Theodore Roosevelt’s trust busting and of course, Social Security.

Our Government Must Maintain Social Security

The need for Social Security follows directly from these basic American values that have come down to us from the founders of our country. A government with a duty to promote the general welfare cannot allow people to starve in poverty when they have worked hard all of their lives. The people who raised and nurtured us and who built the world we live in must not be abandoned in their old age. Moreover, a government with a duty to promote the general welfare cannot renege on commitments that it has made to its people.

If our government does renege on its commitments, the result will surely damage domestic tranquility and produce endemic social conflict, which will render our political system unstable. This is clearly a case in which the government must act to promote the general welfare in order to promote justice and insure domestic tranquility. Thus, Social Security is built on basic, American values that lie at the heart of our system of government and that come down to us from our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence. We must maintain Social Security if we are to be faithful to our values and to what it means to be American.