I will give you a perfect example. A potential client years ago "took a walk" after I spent about three days putting together health coverage for him. I got the numbers to less than 300$ and a moderate deductible which should have been more than affordable for a dual income family with no children, the guy overextended, everything he and his wife owned carried a debt and they couldn't afford the premium. The sad thing is, should one of them fallen ill, they would have been in a financial catastrophe and everything would have evaporated anyway, but, like you stated "you can lead a horse...........".
I am not in the best situation either, after spending nearly 15 years building a life, only to start over with basically nothing this time last year.
while things are working out for me pretty nicely (got a good place to live, decent job, starting a new family, etc) I got a lot of other things I need to continue to work on. What this means is that I am going back to college in an attempt to increase my income in a degree that fits well with my experience. However, I am fortunate in that I am able to. What concerns me is those who never got the break I did. For most people, what I went through is the start of a downward spiral. I will say that I put a ton of work into my life over the last year, but I also had plenty of fortunate breaks as well, nobody can do it alone (in my case, I tend to go pray for something, then either forget about it or convince myself it wont happen, go focus on something else only to realize later, I got exactly what I ask for, I never seem to be able to learn, I am like the worst religious dude, ever). the sad fact is that many people are simply too poor to save for retirement these days. Probably the best thing we can do as a society is admit some level of defeat and roll back some laws and lower expectations to have a life style that is closer to the 50s, but in many communities, that's become illegal in our optimism.
This is what worries me about a lot of the programs where we leave things to the citizenry. studies have shown that we are by nature short term thinkers and I honestly think programs like 401k are simply incompatible with human nature and a lot of the goals we have for society. as a whole, humans suck at liberty and always will. Its unfortunate and i wish it wasn't the case, but i also believe that no amount of education, reeducation, pointing out moral failings, or any other purely informational tactics will ever amount to squat. I would love to take your view of humanity, but I think it is simply unrealistic and parts of the human experience will never achieve the levels of responsibility and ownership that many conservatives expect. Nor has it ever truly occurred in history when people take more than a passing glance.
all in all, my POV sucks, but I think its accurate. Pretty much, I believe that retirement is a thing of the past. Even a seemingly normal thing that would have been a slam dunk ten years ago, like going back to college like I am planning to do carries huge risks even for jobs that are waiting to be filled, like hard core engineering jobs.