13/03/2005 1:13:34 pm
Why Do We Force People Not to Work? Prosperity comes from productive work. But in Western Europe, ever fewer people support an increasing number of people who don?t work. To a large extent, this is due to the current definition of "working age". If we stick to that definition, we will have a dramatic development in the decades to come. The number of people of "working age" in, for example, Italy would decrease from today?s 39 million to 22 million in the year 2050. The situation is similar in the other countries. Thus, with that system, fewer people will work, economic growth will decrease and public expenses explode. Many people find this a very uncomfortable situation. They don?t want to force people to work. But that is not the point; what we do today is to force people not to work. We have no idea how many 70-year-olds who would like to continue to work, since the systems basically force them to quit. If you don?t retire at a certain age, you would lose money since your pension doesn?t increase if you work longer. The OECD has calculated how much you lose in various European countries by continuing to work. They describe it as a tax. In Germany and France, this tax amounts to 50 % for 55-year-olds, in Belgium it is 80 % and in the Netherlands 90 %. This is how much we punish continued work; of course people retire. If we would abolish the pension age and just have a fixed sum in pension, that would change. Then you would get a low pension if you retire early and a high one if you retire late. Then we would see how much people actually want to work. I bet it is quite a lot more than today.