This article first published in Benchmark Magazine (http://www.benchmarkmag.com/).
Pensions! Does anyone still believe that the pension system is functional? Do any of us think that pensions will provide for us when we retire? What is going on?
Surely the point of retirement was originally to provide for those who were too unfit, through age, to work? Pension was society’s provision of an income for those who could not provide for themselves due to, age related, forced retirement from useful work.
Somewhere along the line we confused this pure vision of care for the elderly and developed a selfish vision of escaping the ‘horror'(!) of our working lives and living out a leisure fantasy that we surely deserved!
Well, living as a community just isn’t like that! We all have a responsibility to do good for one another. John Calvin once said that Christians should “choose those employments which yield the greatest advantage to their neighbour.â€?
Fortunately, you and I both know people who seek to redeem their retirement, doing community work, caring for people and many other positive activities that contribute to the strength of their community. Perhaps, if we take Calvin’s advice, we can only truly review our activities at any point in our lives if we seek to break through the distinction between paid work and other forms of work.
Aside from all this there is a need for us to recognise where our provision is coming from. We should always seek to provide for ourselves and only rely upon our communities (the state) to provide for us if we are unable to do so.
Looking at the state of retirement pensions today we see two kinds: We see taxation of workers to provide for retirees (as per National Insurance) and we also see workers saving up for retirement (as per pension funds). We have looked at the former of these two in the brief comments about a community’s provision for it’s dependants. Savings, however, are a very different matter.
We recognise that we live in a changing world. We know that there is no such thing as 100% security. We see pension funds going to the wall, with pensioners ending up losing all of their life’s savings. We also see the risk of prolonged recession eating into our savings, we also live in an age of fantastic medical advances where if we live to be 100 years old we will only have done paid work for half of our lives! Compare this with an era (or even other parts of today’s world) were economically productive work starts at around age 5 and continues until you die aged 43! That would be 88% of your life working!
Are we going to insist that the our children pay for our retirement? Are the young going to rise up against the old and refuse to pay, or is our ageing population going to ensure that any democratic decision is in favour of the retirees?