[extropy-chat] Real estate as an extropian investment

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:

> 
> On Aug 21, 2005, at 4:15 PM, Rik van Riel wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 21 Aug 2005, Mike Lorrey wrote:
> >> The future financial problems of social security, medicare and
> >> medicaid, are all because people are living longer, increasing the
> >> years they receive benefits by 2-3 times.
> >> I expect that true longevity treatment technology will be held in 
> >> limbo
> >> by the FDA and other governments health ministries until after the
> >> baby boom is mostly dead and buried.
> >>
> >
> > How about free longevity treatment for the old, but only
> > for the people who haven't gone into retirement yet?
> > You get to choose between longevity and retirement...
> >
> 
> Why this distinction?  Many "retired" people are only retired from  
> needing a paycheck.  They are active on their own projects.  Even if 
> they are not so active many are not active because their bodies don't
> easily support them being more active.  Assuming longevity includes  
> some degree of rejuvenation, why should it be denied to those whir  
> physically most need it?

The distinction is because the retirement system is not set up to deal
with people living unusually long into retirement. It is broken right
now because too many people are living longer than the system intended
or expected. It is not structured to vary the retirement age with
average life expectancy. Riks proposal is to give potential retirees
the choice: accept Social Security benefits or longevity benefits, not
both. This is a good idea, IMHO, but ideally I'd rather up the
retirement age immediately (or over a decade) to 70-75, then let it
float with the life expectancy. This was attempted partly in the 90's,
when it was upped to 67.

Under a floating retirement age scenario, as more people take longevity
treatment, life expectancy goes up, and with it the retirement age, so
you have to take longevity treatments to collect on your social
security. The result of this would be that the luddites work themselves
to their graves and those with or who accept pro-longevity POVs
survive. This will result in a much more extropic world without
coersion.

If such a system is enacted, it will be interesting to see the sort of
rationalizations that some luddites will make to justify accepting
longevity treatment so that they can 'take the fight for primitivism
into the future', to the exclusion of others.... ;)



Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
Founder, Constitution Park Foundation:
http://constitutionpark.blogspot.com
Personal/political blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com

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