4 ms·

You can retire whenever you want. The government decides when to start funding it. As for why - the same reason why they get to decide what side of the road yo

• foxyv 9mo ago
  This boils down to a "Might makes right" claim. It doesn't answer the question why. Only how.
  • paxys 9mo ago
    What question do you want answered exactly? Why we have governments and not anarchy?
    • foxyv 9mo ago
      Why does the government get to decide when we retire?
      • paxys 9mo ago
        Like I said, they don't. You can retire today. They decide when you get access to a national retirement plan. Citizens of the country vote for that plan and how it is implemented.
        • foxyv 9mo ago
          I personally could retire today. Most people can't. There is no referendum I remember where we decided to raise the retirement age. It seems like our government just kind of decided to do so.
      • seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
        Couldn’t you say the same thing about social security or pensions? There is a lot of economic forces that direct people to work until a certain age, the government controlling a benefit is only one of them. As to why, you’ll need to dissect representative democracies in Singapore’s case.
      • rayiner 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        • foxyv 9mo ago
          You apparently know very little about me. Edit: Although, when my time comes as it inevitably will, I think the wilderness would be a nice place to do it. Maybe in a tree.
  • jonahx 9mo ago
    It definitely answers why. You are asking for an appeal to some moral justification. But there isn't one, and it doesn't matter. That's the whole point of "might makes right".
    • foxyv 9mo ago
      In an attempt to steelman, you are saying: "There is no moral justification for the government setting a retirement age, but they are able to. So it doesn't matter."
      • philwelch 9mo ago
        The government doesn’t set the retirement age. You can retire whenever you want. There are no laws against a 50 year old retiring and living off his own savings, nor against a 70 year old continuing to work. There is a minimum age to collect old age benefits from the government. The justification for that should be obvious.
        • mothballed 9mo ago
          But the CPF isn't represented as benefits from the government. It's represented and claimed to be your own savings that you have set aside. At gamed bond rates where the government skims off the top.
        • foxyv 9mo ago
          The choice between working and starving to death is not a choice. If your savings have been taken by the government, then you don't have a choice. The justification is to force people to work until they are too old to do so. Then steal whatever they have left with medical bills and price hikes on necessities.
          • philwelch 9mo ago
            And if I was emperor, I would abolish payroll taxes and phase out Social Security. Unfortunately, we live in a democracy.
  • itemize123 9mo ago
    so the country can be productive? so it can have resources to fulfil duties to citizens?
• cryptonector 9mo ago
  The real question is not why the government gets to set the retirement age. Of course it gets to set it IF it's involved in paying for people's retirements! The real question is why governments insist on euphemistic names ("forced savings") that imply the opposite of the reality of the programs. And why people put up with such financial repression schemes. The answer to the first question is to keep people from being too upset too suddenly, too many all at once. The answer to the latter is that the people usually don't get a say in these things. For Singapore this program probably makes a great deal of sense since Singapore is singularly vulnerable given its location in the world. To build what they did they probably needed these sorts of policies. I suspect most Singaporeans don't mind all that much, though I don't know. We would very much mind this sort of thing here in the U.S. though!