Under such a pattern, we see China's large-scale waste of human capital. People, each and every one of them, are the sole driving force behind the development of the market economy. The ultimate significance of old-age insurance lies in the respect and comfort for life. But in our country, its front end is a kind of restriction, exclusion, and deprivation of people. The market economy has an intrinsic and wonderful balance. Without the cause, there is no purpose. If the purpose is ignored or alienated, the cause will also be gone. The development of each individual is our direction and motivation for development. Depriving individuals of the opportunity and rights to develop, the prosperity and rise that this country seeks with all its might will be like water without a source, a tree without roots. What we see now, the dilemma of old-age insurance, is just a small sign of a part of the vested interest class in this country going against market logic.
The essence of the problem lies in the fact that the original intention of the old-age insurance system undoubtedly points to each and every person. So in recent years, we have seen that even the smallest private companies must sign labor contracts related to old-age insurance when hiring employees. Even in remote villages, slogans about old-age insurance are posted in the fields. For a time, the country's old-age insurance seemed grand and beneficial to all, making us feel as if we had really entered a happy well-off society.
Interestingly, some local governments, when they need to improve their fiscal capacity, think of the demographic dividend, thinking of those groups like ants that no one takes care of, who actually have tax-paying ability; but when it comes to establishing welfare systems like old-age insurance, these non-systematic groups are excluded, and the government tries every way to shirk the responsibility of public institutions.
If relying entirely on the national pension system is a naive fantasy, then after removing this "very silly, very naive" imagination, what the so-called middle class needs to deal with today is a whole new life plan. They must be prepared in advance under the cage of the market and the system, learning to "worry before the worries of the elderly and enjoy after the joy of the young."
Yes, this is the essence of the problem: you are not present because you are not within the system, so you have nothing to do with the country's pension system. If you don't recognize this fact, you will waste part of your already scarce income; if you recognize this situation, you will be sad, suddenly feel afraid about your future, and start worrying unprecedentedly.
Every worker unrelated to the system should carefully consider the following issues:
Therefore, personal rights need to be re-emphasized. An obvious economic phenomenon is that many developing countries today cannot truly "marketize" and "globalize" domestic capital. The essential reason is that the powerful classes and vested interest groups in these countries benefit from the collusion of power and the market. They intend to establish a system similar to a "bell jar," where people inside the system live within the bell jar, quietly living off their vested interests, enjoying peace and prosperity, while people outside the system live outside the bell jar. The system does not genuinely care about their birth, aging, illness, and death, but instead monopolizes their rights to participate in real market economies.
Everyone lives according to their own personal interests and cost-benefit analysis. More people see the inherent flaws in the pension insurance system, so more people choose to give up and not participate. Even if only 50 million people choose to give up, that means a loss of 50 billion yuan in annual insured funds for the country's pension system. This economic behavior of voting with one's feet is dangerous as it causes a crisis in the state's pension savings capacity. It’s almost like an Exodus related to the system, with more people choosing to leave. The government initially thought it didn’t matter, perhaps even seeing it as a burden reduction for the system, but over time, they found that things were not that simple. When a large number of people choose to escape the system, at least in terms of pension funds, there is a significant shortfall.
Regarding the pension system issue, countless white-collar workers, journalists, editors, lawyers, engineers, writers, and poets outside the system face pension situations not much better than farmers. At this moment, these people may earn more than farmers, but...
In the current situation where the national welfare system is extremely incomplete, the population dividend has been exhausted, and aging is increasingly severe, for the generation of only children created by the family planning policy, the pension problem faced is not only the dilemma of whether they can support their parents' old age but also the unknown worry of how they themselves will retire in the future, becoming a heavy burden in life that cannot be borne.
The existing pension insurance system stipulates that one must continuously pay pensions for 15 years to be effective. Please ask, who today can work continuously in one place for 15 years? It is said that pensions can actually be transferred across regions, but in reality, this seemingly beautiful vision is hard to implement. Not to mention the impatient looks and rude scolding of the clerks, even if one runs from Shenzhen to Beijing, or from Shanghai to Guangzhou, the round-trip airfare might offset that bit of pension. Many people ultimately can only choose to give up, and the frequent resetting of pensions is not uncommon.
But unfortunately, if you are not part of the system, that is, if you are not an elderly person with administrative rank, if you are not a civil servant or intellectual retired from an administrative or public institution, if you are not a retired employee of a monopolistic state-owned enterprise, and if you still take the current pension insurance system too seriously, then you are being too naive. Someone joked that this seemingly beautiful pension insurance system is actually very much like the famous Catch-22, no matter what you do, in the end, you are the loser; others say it is more like an absurd play, because you are not present, so all your efforts in the end are just a dream, it is not real.