If social secuty is insurance so are food stamps. Fact is the called it welfare when they passed it.
"The Social Security program that would eventually be adopted in late 1935 relied for its core principles on the concept of
"social insurance." Social insurance was a respectable and serious intellectual tradition that began in Europe in the 19th century and was an expression of a European social welfare tradition. It was first adopted in Germany in 1889 at the urging of the famous Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Indeed, by the time America adopted social insurance in 1935, there were 34 nations already operating some form of social insurance program(about 20 of these were contributory programs like Social Security). Philosophically, social insurance emphasized government-sponsored efforts to provide for the economic security of its citizens. The tradition of social insurance would come to be seen as the reasonable, practical alternative to the radical calls to action represented by Townsend, Long, Sinclair and the others.
Although the definition of
social insurance can vary considerably in its particulars, its basic features are: the insurance principle under which a group of persons are "insured" in some way against a defined risk, and a social element which usually means that the program is shaped in part by broader social objectives, rather than being shaped solely by the self-interest of the individual participants. Social insurance coverage can be provided for a number of different types of insured conditions, from disability and death to old-age or unemployment. We may find it obvious to think of death, disability or unemployment as conditions causing loss of income and which can be ameliorated by pooling of risk. It is at first a little odd to think of old-age or retirement in these same terms. But that is precisely how the early social insurance theorists conceived of retirement, as producing a loss of income due to cessation of work activity.
One of the first American books on
social insurance was by a Columbia University economics professor named Henry Seager. Seager explained the principle of old-age security based on social insurance in his 1910 book, "Social Insurance, A Program of Social Reform":
"As changing economic conditions are rendering the dependence of old people on their descendants for support increasingly precarious, so, on the other hand, new obstacles are arising to providing for old age through voluntary saving. . . The proper method of safeguarding old age is clearly through some plan of insurance. . . for every wage earner to attempt to save enough by himself to provide for his old age is needlessly costly. The intelligent course is for him to combine with other wage earners to accumulate a common fund out of which old-age annuities may be paid to those who live long enough to need it."
One of the earliest American advocates of a plan that could be recognized as
modern social insurance was Theodore Roosevelt. In 1912, Roosevelt addressed the convention of the Progressive Party and made a strong statement on behalf of social insurance:
"We must protect the crushable elements at the base of our present industrial structure...it is abnormal for any industry to throw back upon the community the human wreckage due to its wear and tear, and the hazards of sickness, accident, invalidism, involuntary unemployment, and old age should be provided for through insurance." TR would succeed in having a plank adopted in the Progressive Party platform that stated: "We pledge ourselves to work unceasingly in state and nation for: . . .The protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment, and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use."
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