Relax Normies
To start off, to the Normies reading this who may naively support’s 401k’s, bless your hearts. I know, you probably just thought 401k’s were supposed to help people save right? Saving is good after all - people should save for retirement! Responsibility, yea! Compound interest, yea! The Current American Lifescripttm, yea!
Innocent, sweet summer children. I know. I know you thought that. Just know the vitriol that follows is not directed at you. No I did not catch the game this weekend.
But before we go on the attack, first off - Why go after something as simple and seemingly innocuous as the 401k program?
Because it’s a dumb idea and a bad idea. And when you pile 10,000 midwit ideas on top of each other you get the steaming pile of garbage that is the current state of the American economic system, which only looks good in comparison to the rest of the West, which is of course generally worse.
The 401k’s seeming innocuousness is actually a sign of its insidiousness. At its core, the program is a sign of this country’s mediocrity and decline, and we should not spare the feelings of midwits who serve to preserve the industry and system it props up.
J'Accuse!
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with being a Normie. There’s nothing wrong with working in the 401k industry and recognizing it should be destroyed. There is, however, something wrong with upholding and supporting a fundamentally parasitical and extractive system, personally benefitting from it, and doing nothing to change it.
If you actively advocate for the 401k program’s existence, or use your political power to keep the 401k grift going, you are stupid.
Let me repeat - You are stupid. It takes a combination of un-reflective sloth and dishonesty to work in or for an industry and not only fail to recognize when you personally benefit from your industry’s grift, but to actively support that grift.
Why should we be nice to you? Fuck you. Fuck your job, you should lose it. Fuck your feelings. And if you have a problem with me saying so, go fuck yourself and cry in a corner with your 401k plan, you stupid midwit who has probably done nothing worth being called great in your entire mediocre life.
The Unseen Plunder of the 401k Program
What is wrong with the 401k Program?
“[T]he whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.” ―Henry Hazlitt
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ―Frédéric Bastiat
Fundamentally the problem with the 401k program, like most all government programs, is it violates Hazlitt’s Law by failing to take into account the unseen consequences of the program. Bastiat would undoubtably consider the 401k program to be plunder, as it created an entire profession that produces nothing and whose sole job is to ensure compliance with an artificial government regulation and taxation scheme.
Below are the 5 most obvious problems with the 401k program:
It creates an entire industry dedicated to the maintenance of the system.
As stated above, the 401k program has created an entire industry dedicated simply to compliance with the program’s byzantine rules.
I am currently attempting to set up a 401k for my company. There are many options to choose from, and each of them has its own set of rules and variables. I’m doing something called a QACA Safe Harbor 401k, which bypasses some sort of non-discrimination testing, which is basically some sort of requirement that you as an employer make sure your poor and your rich employees both save around the same amount. Or something.
I spent over an hour going over this with my 401k guy for the second time and I still could not explain, either to anyone reading this or to my employees, what all the rules are, or even be definitively certain that I picked the correct option.
That’s ok though, because we can just pay a firm several thousand dollars a year in order to comply, so that our employees can benefit and we can attract more talent. There is essentially no way we could comply by ourselves, but that’s not a problem at all, that’s why we have a 401k guy - just pay someone else to help out! Capitalism, right?
No actually fuck you kill yourself. (Not actually, that’s a sin, don’t do that).
If a regulation requires an entire industry of people who I have to pay to ensure compliance, that’s obviously a parasitical industry and the entire program should obviously not exist. Just one more reason you should send your local congressperson a bottle of roach spray, to remind him or her that they are a literal cockroach for imposing this upon us.
It creates two economics tiers of employers and employees.
The reason employers want 401k programs is because they provide tax advantages and because employees want them (for the same reason).
But when you create a compliance cost to enjoy a major tax benefit that not everyone will have access to you have in effect created a two-tiered economy:
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Those companies that can comply and those that can’t.
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People who work for companies with a 401k plan and those that don’t
But actually it’s even worse than that, because you also have the IRA program as well. What’s the difference between the 401k program and the IRA program? Again, I’ve had it explained to me several times, but I couldn’t tell you much more than that essentially if you can afford it, the 401k is just hands down better, but it’s more expensive to comply with.
So actually we have 3 economic tiers, with the dividing line as you would expect revolving around company size - the bigger the company is, the easier it is to comply and the more privileged therefore are their employees. The smaller the company the harder compliance is, and the less easier it is to get people to work for you.
It stifles entrepreneurship.
This effectively is a special handout to big companies, as well as an entrepreneurship tax on any Serf foolish enough to attempt to start their own company and compete with the Lords in our Feudal Fake-Capitalist System.
If you want the tax benefit of the 401k program, you have to set it up yourself (obviously), rather than just working for “the man” who can provide it for you as a reward for your obedience to the system. Now, you probably won’t make enough money working for yourself to benefit, so most likely just sucks for you no 401k.
If you want to compete for quality employees though, well time to comply bitch (whip crack) - follow our tax rules or we’ll throw you in prison for life. We’ll let you know within 7 years whether you did it right.
Remember, our Founding Fathers fought a revolution over a 3% tea tax, and there are undoubtedly some people reading this who think I just need to calm down and that there’s no need for foul language.
Unfortunately, they weren’t able to castrate me in public school like they now do to little boys, so I will not, in fact, calm down over 401ks. Maybe people should get mad more often at those who do not stand up for what’s right, rather than at people for violating people’s sensibilities, which are largely situational.
The 401k program is essentially a massive start-up cost, and is one more systematic disadvantage that makes it harder for people like me to make it. And many many more like me will never make it. The entire industry is an illegitimate grift, and believe me I know what corrupt industries look like, since I work in arguably the third most corrupt industry in existence after politics and medicine (lawyer, please don’t hate me).
It artificially inflates the stock market.
The entire point of the 401k program is to artificially incentivize greater investment into the stock market. That bears repeating - the whole point of the 401k grift is to induce more of a particular kind of savings, i.e., the financialized kind, than you otherwise would have.
That’s a classic market distortion. The 401k program necessarily, through a government program, inflates stock prices by creating an artificial tax-incentive to invest. You get to keep more of your money, if and only if, you pump up someone else’s retirement gains in the stock market (that theoretically always goes up in the long run, at least so the propaganda goes).
You have to do this rather than keeping more of your money for your current needs, whether those be building a family, building a business, or perhaps simply enjoying life in the here and now. Otherwise you get taxed more.
It makes politics captive to the market.
This artificial by law inflation of the stock market has helped contribute culturally and politically to the retirement industrial complex, with funds literally locked up under pain of massive tax penalties until a certain age.
If you can’t take your funds out until you retire, and there is a large generation now retiring that can only use their funds by taking them out, and the younger generations are both smaller numerically (because said generation didn’t have enough kids, because they rebelled against God’s laws on sex and overthrew the restraints of traditional religion they inherited) and worse off financially despite the metrics that suggest otherwise, so they don’t have enough money to put into the stock market to replace those funds, what do you think could happen? And what sort of politics will become incentivized, now that we have bifurcated the economy in this way?
Well, we may be about to find out. I’m sure nothing too bad could happen - after all, it was just a 401k program, right?
Common Sense Alternatives
So what should we do instead of having a 401k program? Hm, let’s think - how about we just let people keep more of their money so they can save more? That seems like a good starting place.
Or what about we make it so that when people save, their money actually keeps its value, rather than forcing them into the stock market to keep up with everything inflating around them? Yea I don’t know, maybe those would be good places to start.
Was it a coincidence that 401k’s came about after the financialization of the economy and the stagflation that occurred after we were taken off the gold standard in 1971? In fact, did anything good some out of the 70s?
But what about those people who don’t save?!? Ok, well if you’re trying to “fix” people who don’t save, making a savings program to allow them to save isn’t going to make them save - You can’t make people save who don’t want to, you can only distort markets and offer artificial incentives that involve taking from some to give to others.
More broadly though, does anyone think that Congress in 1978 actually wrote a good law? Well, I guess the midwits do. But the law itself literally arose out of an accident within the byzantine IRS tax code, which has always and without exception been an enemy of Liberty.
401k’s literally came about because Congress was too stupid and incompetent to actually write or understand the laws they were passing. Just like they are today.
Down With The American Oligarchy
If you are a Republican, you should be against 401k’s. They fundamentally interfere with the free market, and serve to stifle entrepreneurship.
If you are a Democrat, you should be against 401k’s. They systematically favor big businesses and corporations, and serve to increase economic inequality.
Those who decry the rise in support for “Socialism” fail in their duty to defend “Capitalism” when they don’t understand the difference between Free Markets and Corrupt Capitalism.
Free Markets do not necessitate Oligarchy, which is what we clearly currently have – The Rule of the Few for the Benefit of the Few, rather than the Benefit of All, as defined by Aristotle in The Politics.
We should have a bipartisan bill to end the 401k and the IRA:
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Unleash the power of the market and provide economic relief to all by releasing those funds captured by the illegitimate 401k grift.
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Stop artificially propping up of the stock market and artificially creating a two-tiered economic system.
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End the artificial benefits for those lucky enough to have a 401k job. Stop giving the corporations large enough to bear the costs of setting up a 401k program special advantages.
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Get rid of the fake jobs for those who manage the IRS regulations that a Congress long ago, full of mediocre midwit men, allowed to come into being. It was on their watch that this country was allowed to fall into ruin and decay, and we should stop being the lesser sons of greater sires.
If we don’t get rid of the Corrupt Capitalism that has taken hold in America, a lot worse things are going to happen to our country than the small bit of (good) chaos that would come about with the total elimination of the 401k program.
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