Greenspan is harping on Social Security again. It needs to be fixed, he says. I'm beginning to have a bit more radical opinion. This is based on the fact that Social Security as an American institution came about in 1935. People talk about it as if it has been the staple of retirement systems since the beginning of time. If you start with the historical retirement age of 65, only for the last five years has anybody paid into it for their lifetime. For the last ten years we've been talking about it being broken. It's broken all right. It's a pyramid scheme, and pyramid schemes are illegal because they are fatally flawed over time. Social Security hasn't worked for even one generation. And let's look at the cost and the huge (though not enough) amount of money they've collected. Close it. The government shouldn't be in the pension business. Give all the money back. They can't, they will claim. Unscrupulous people have been spending it. A lot of money is simply gone. Precisely why the government shouldn't be in this business. They're crooks. Would you give your retirement account to the mafia? Same thing. But that's OK. Let bygones be bygones. Count up what you've got. Count out what you owe us. Subtract. Find out the loss percentage. We'll let you slide for the difference, just give us our money back.

Just think about what effect you might see from roughly 1.5 trillion dollars being injected back into the economy... Some would squander it, some would invest it. Either way, it would trigger the largest economic expansion of any society in history.