Trade card, advertising J. & P. Coats spool cotton, showing Lilliputians tying up Gulliver. 1 print : lithograph, color; ca. 1875-1900
Today’s wealth transfer—from the young to the elderly through Medicare and Social Security—was foreshadowed and brutally satirized in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Senior citizens, according to Swift, “would in time become Proprietors of the whole Nation.” They would seize the government, “which for want of Abilities to manage, must end in the Ruin of the Public.”
Gulliver met the immense financial burden face-to-face when he encountered the Struldbruggs, or Immortals. This rare group of people could live forever in imaginary Lugg-nagg where Swift deftly outlined a fictional intergenerational conflict.
Swift’s work may be satire, but it’s instructive and relevant. The media have identified these federal government entitlements—Social Security and Medicare—as a veritable time bomb that is weighing heavily on American taxpayers and will be a painful legacy for the nation’s youth. Public pension funds and benefits are having a similar effect on government entities. It is clear that the creation of additional millions of immortals through public pension funds is wreaking havoc on municipal and state budgets. Like Swift’s observations, these problems have their origins in the eighteenth century. In this case, French magistrates were at the vanguard of the public pension movement.
The historian David Troyansky captured the French saga vividly in the Journal of Aging Studies. The story goes that Thouvenel, who had served thirty years
