As Dwight Eisenhower was leaving office, he warned against government overexpansion from the accumulation of political power in the military-industrial complex. As an experienced general, he said that, even for the constitutionally enumerated function of national defense, we must “avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.”
We don’t hear as much about the military-industrial complex now, although, Eisenhower’s warning seems quite apt for current American policy. However, the military is hardly the only area where undue political power bloats government and restricts freedom. In fact, as someone who teaches college students about government policy but has recently “qualified” to be propagandized by AARP and other senior organizations, I have been struck by the extent Americans sacrifice the future in response to the elderly-political complex.The two biggest fiscal problems in America are Social Security and Medicare. Social Security faces a 13-digit unfunded liability, and Medicare’s is several times larger. Together, they create a gargantuan bequest of IOUs for future generations, far exceeding the national debt. But where are senior organizations on these issues? They insist that Social Security is safe, and attack any serious attempt to reform it if that involves the slightest risk that seniors might bear any of the unavoidable costs of dealing with its over-promises, even though they have been the primary beneficiaries of that largesse. And rather than consider reining in Medicare’s exploding liabilities, they constantly push to expand the program and the burdens it will leave for their children and grandchildren.
The simplest explanation for this is that for all the talk about caring about future generations, senior citizen groups are far more concerned about their short run than their heirs’ long run, reinforced by politicians’ similar bias toward visible benefits in the short run (before the full effects of their policies become apparent but when they have to get reelected) and in favor of make-or-break issues for those who actually vote (Social Security and Medicare, for the elderly).
This is illustrated by the disconnect between the advice seniors routinely give their grandchildren and what they support politically for themselves. Their typical wisdom to children boils down to “don’t discount the future so much,” whether it is to stay in school longer, to spend more time and effort studying and building their skills and less time and money consuming today, to delay getting married or having children until they can afford to pay for those choices themselves, etc.. Yet, in contrast, senior organizations support policies to increase what they get today at the expense of the future, almost totally discounting the predictable effects that will follow later.
You see the same dynamic in many drug policy proposals. Senior groups favor almost every attempt to use government’s coercive power to lower the price they must pay for drugs that are currently available, such as imposing explicit and implicit (regulatory) price ceilings on existing drugs. But they ignore both the violation of others’ property rights and the disastrous effects on their grandchildren, for whom the long term effect of undermining the incentives to develop new drugs is far more important than forcing down current drug prices (high in large part because of government policies ranging from the FDA to the tax code). And those effects would be large, given the disproportionate share of new breakthrough medicines that originate in the U.S.
John Maynard Keynes once denigrated focusing on the ultimate, long run effects of policy by sneering that “in the long run, we are all dead.” But, as Henry Hazlitt observed in Economics of One Lesson, “the tragedy is that, on the contrary, we are already suffering the long-run consequences of the policies of the remote or recent past. Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.”
Unfortunately, the self-proclaimed advocates for senior citizens have followed Keynes’ view, resulting in concerns that are solely for their benefit in the short run, ignoring the adverse long run consequences that already heavily burden their children, but will even more heavily burden their children’s children. That may reflect what political advocacy groups do—try to get more for themselves, necessarily at others’ expense—but the electoral clout of seniors and the massive transfer of resources involved makes the elderly-political complex one of the greatest threats to those who will still be around to bear the long run consequences they wish us to ignore today.
