A few things you don't get about Social Security
First, Social Security never was a 401k, with money in the bank equal to the need of all future retirees. It's old age/disability insurance, meaning that if you're fortunate enough to become too old to work regularly, or become disabled before you get old, it pays you money. It is funded by current wage earners, not by the people who get the benefits.
The "Social Security trust fund" is a bank account at the U.S. treasury, which contains the excess of money collected via the FICA tax over money paid out to retirees, accumulated over the entire 80 years history of SS. It is required by law to invest in nothing but U.S. Federal bonds. The excess has really been just a sneaky way of collecting taxes for the general use of the Federal government for 80 years. Whether it has a positive or a negative balance makes no difference to the Federal government's ability to pay benefits.
Social Security costs the U.S. 5% of GDP now. At the height of the baby boom retirement, it is estimated to cost 6%. Increasing SS revenues, either by the FICA tax or some other means, is easily within our capability. Medicare is a different problem, a much more serious problem. If we continue paying medical bills in our current style, with our current rate of crazy growth in per-procedure costs, then Medicare could sink the government. Of course, even if we don't pay for the elderly, the growth in health care costs will eventually destroy the rest of the economy.
Finally, if you had "liberty" and no Social Security or Medicare payroll tax, what makes you think that 7.4% of your pay (and your employer's matching amount) would wind up in your pocket? Is there anything in the capitalist class's current behavior that makes you believe they'd give it to you? They'd cut your pay, because you wouldn't need that money to meet current needs, and they would put it in their own pockets, and invest it in countries like China or Bangladesh, because Americans expect too much for themselves, relative to the genuinely poor of the world. You'd have the liberty to work til you dropped, and starve in a cardboard box with your illness untended, until you ended up in an underfunded charitable hospital, where you could die between clean sheets.
Give me that good ol' "progressivism" every time.
