The scope and depth of your reply is impressive; I can follow the gist of what you are saying, but am unable to understand it in detail and absorb it in whole. I have no legal training, and so while your comments seem to make sense, I unfortunately can't simply adopt your line of reasoning wholesale.
(As an aside: I think that you should have immediately "put your cards on the table" and begun with this in your very first posting in this thread, rather than making repeated opaque references to "unlawfulness" - which made you sound like someone with a "hidden agenda.")
But again, putting aside for a moment your (well-founded, it seems) accusation that S.S. is "unlawful" - How should one then proceed?
How should a principled person who has been forced to pay into S.S. his entire working life then act, upon reaching retirement age?
Are these arguments of yours mere musings, without any real-world impact, or is there a practical consequence to them - specifically, in regards to applying for S.S. benefits?
Regards,
I’ve been trying to address the practical response as I see it since the first post. I’m not going to take something I’m not legally entitled to.
As for the length of various posts: I’m kinda like that one old Foghorn Leghorn joke: if I get the urge I can spit out more words than a dictionary in a shredder. Far longer, in fact, than the earlier post.
But a lot of the time I’m just like everyone else just giving opinions and not trying to outline some deeper view. These forums are generally casual conversations and, at least for me, I usually see long posts as best reserved for when a conversation has started.
Or, put another way, hitting people over the head with a long post, even one formatted to be easier to read than some wall’o’text, seems to me to be presumptuous (that they’d be interested in what I’ve got to saaaaaaay) and generally a lot of a lot.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t ever jumped in guns a blazing, only that I’m aware that not everyone likes being attacked by page-down-zillas, or even babies of the species.
I do a great mad scientist laugh ala Mandark from Dexter’s Laboratory.