I have always been amazed by the number of people who think Social Security is unique to the United States. Or if not truly unique, they figure that maybe a couple of those “socialist” countries such as Sweden and Denmark might have social insurance programs in place, but surely not too many other places. As someone once said to me following a speech I had given: “You know that Social Security is just one of the social experiments forced on this country by FDR and it’s doomed to failure just like so many of his other New Deal programs.”
This guy obviously was not a history major. But he mimicked views held by so many people: that Social Security is some kind of income redistribution experiment that the United States is testing. And if by some miracle it works here, maybe other nations around the world might follow suit.
