Politics & Power Quote by Ken Mehlman

Mehlman’s questions are engineered to feel like common sense, but they’re really a branding exercise: take a New Deal-era social insurance program and repackage it in the language of consumer choice and property rights. “Why shouldn’t” is a trapdoor phrase. It presumes the moral high ground and forces dissenters into the awkward position of arguing against “young Americans,” “future generations,” and a “higher rate of return” - three crowd-pleasers in one breath.

The subtext is the conservative critique of Social Security as both fiscally precarious and politically vulnerable. By saying people should “own their own Social Security,” Mehlman smuggles in the premise that the current system is not truly yours at all, but a pot of money Congress raids. That’s a charged insinuation: it frames Social Security less as an earned, collectively funded insurance pool and more as a personal account threatened by government theft. The rhetorical villain isn’t market risk; it’s Congress.

Context matters here: this is the early-2000s push for partial privatization, when Republicans sought to convert some payroll taxes into individual investment accounts. The sales pitch leaned hard on generational anxiety (young workers won’t get what they “paid in”) and on Wall Street optimism (returns will outpace government promises). What’s left unsaid is the tradeoff: higher potential returns come with exposure to downturns, and “ownership” implies a shift away from guaranteed benefits toward individualized risk - a cultural pivot from solidarity to self-management, with politics recast as a meddling middleman rather than the mechanism of shared security.