Hey, man, glad to see that you seem to have enjoyed your recent weekend with some of the other statists you know. Just to respond to a couple of things you're saying:

First, there's an argument about how things will work versus whether you think they're just or not. I take your normative comments about "confiscation" and your general libertarian orientation to mean that even if Social Security works, i.e. has reduced poverty among the elderly, that it constitutes a statist action that you would oppose for other principled reasons. Do I read you correctly?

Second, as to whether it would work or not:

Walter Williams says that the government could conceivably cut benefits and we'd be powerless to do anything about it, in contrast to a private party that, say, we could sue if it didn't deliver on a promise. Private accounts will pay whatever benefits they have accrued over the years, the argument goes, so you won't have a future government cut your benefits.

Of course, as you libertarians are painfully aware, the government in fact can (and does) take private money all the time, through taxes (not enough on the rich for my tastes!) Is it politically unlikely that the government will tax private accounts in the future? I suppose, but benefit cuts will be just as politically unlikely.

While benefit cuts in the future are a matter of some conjecture (my favorite two remedies for any shortfalls that may occur in Social Security are progressively taxing benefits and raising the $90,000 cap), it is a guarantee that some percentage of people who invest in the private market are going to end up worse off than if there was no change. The market goes up and down, and after all, and even well-meaning, intelligent, conscientious people lose money in it.

That's what Social Security is all about -- a baseline of benefits that protects against destitution when someone, perhaps due to no fault of their own, doesn't have anything to retire on (more ideally, Social Security supplements other forms of retirement income, like investments, pensions, 401(k) plans). I don't see how privatization (partial or not) can possibly work without diluting that basic guarantee against destitution in retirement. "Confiscation" or no, it seems just to me.