Your comment reminds me of the remarks of Michael Cullen, New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, at the Retirement Commission Symposium in June of 2003:

“I have often said that the ability to retire in a degree of personal comfort, without worry and with dignity, is the least that citizens can expect in a modern, developed economy. I have also said that it is the most they can expect. They cannot expect the state to maintain in retirement the incomes the people became accustomed to during their working lives.”

With subsidies for retirement saving (KiwiSaver), New Zealand sadly is moving away from this philosophy of government.

We can fairly easily establish who amongst the old are poor or suffering deprivation. We can also measure fairly easily how successful state interventions might be to alleviate or even fix that. Also which programmes work (at what cost) and which don’t provide value for money. The scale of the state’s involvement will depend on the amount society is prepared to pay. The two drivers here will be the annual amount payable to each old person and the age from which it starts. Income tests should be avoided as they often hurt the people they are intended to help.

It’s not for the state to say what citizens might do about the rest of their retirement wealth needs. That’s for them to decide, including whether to smooth consumption between working and non-working periods.

On those grounds, compulsory private provision and tax breaks have no place. Neither should the state get involved in helping citizens to maintain pre-retirement living standards in the Bismarckian mode. Beyond the objective of alleviating or, preferably, eliminating aged deprivation, everything else is for individuals. Only they can settle the ‘utility’ function that Popper refers to.

All this doesn’t mean the state is uninterested in citizens’ decisions. States can express that interest through information and education programmes but they should keep their hands out of citizens’ pockets.