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Any privatization that is not radical enough hands another, insanely powerful weapon to the statists: The selection of available equities.
If we were to switch to a system tomorrow in which the SSA was choosing where anyone could invest, there'd be ESG requirements out the wazoo. Corporations with government contracts would be aggressively shortlisted - especially anything in the military industrial complex! Foreign investments wouldn't be permitted of course, and for some reason Mutual Funds would be the default selections.
Just as in healthcare, expense ratios for various pooling securities would start out as X, with some short-sighted legislated maximum rate of change like Y, and then a dozen loopholes that fuck everyone who bought into the system to make the actual costs Z + Z + Z + Z. The brokerages could sink pennies into lobbying for billion-dollar payouts from coerced contributions.
The popularity of Social Security is unfathomable. A ponzi scheme in which the government steals from you to invest in itself. The sheer selfishness of the first free riders (and the soon-to-be bailout recipients) shows just how cheap political support is to muster.
And then if the privatization is radical enough and coercion actually is removed - well then the idiots who can't think past the next paycheck are going to starve. I've seen too many 6-figure earners with 0% retirement contributions in my life to have any faith in people's ability to care for themselves. A political crisis will ensue as the dumbest among us live in shacks in old age, a rousing call to action will follow, and our wheelchair-bound president will....well.... you've seen this movie before. Why bother trying?
I don't think it'd have to be too different from incentivized investment accounts. And there are plenty of existing pension funds for govt employees that hold international equities and not-particularly-green companies, so govt control doesn't necessarily mean doom.
Not necessarily, but a massive centralised government investment fund would be a much more attractive target for lobbying.
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