this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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me_irl
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On some level, that is a useful way of looking at things. The reason for making the distinction between workers (people who sell their own time for a living) and owners (people who own for a living) is because they have different political interests. The workers benefit from paid sick leave, higher minimum wage, and from wellfare state stuff like progressive tax funded health care and all that. All of this disadvantages the owning class. And, if you assume retirees fund their retirements through investments (which is not generally true btw, private pensions are not the only model), this holds on some level for retirees as well. If their income depends on the profits of some company, then it is not to their benefit if that company needs to pay workers more.
It's a simplification, but yes, it can be meaningful to think of retirees as "rich" in this sense for some political analyses.
When you have a public pension, the difference is just that you do not take it via profit, but via some sort of tax. So for pensioners in general, they do not want to increase the real pay of workers. It is also hard to argue that a government pension is not a form of wealth, when something similar on the private market is considered that.
I don't understand this. Why?
Why give more to the workers, when you can take it yourself?
Yeah, so that argument makes sense when your pension is privately funded. I can't really connect the dots for the public ones.
In a public pension, there is some sort of tax, which is taken from workers to pay the pensions. If you want to increase pensions, you need to increase those taxes, hence everything else being equal you lower the real wage of workers.