One such event happened Tuesday during a Ben Shapiro monologue that started with an observation about Joe Biden's age but quickly became a critique of Social Security and the very idea of retirement. "Frankly," he said, "I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem." 

Ben Shapiro: "No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem." pic.twitter.com/ckShBXjauq

— Jason S. Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) March 12, 2024

I've included the full transcript below so you can see the full context of the statement.

While I think we are in need of a national discussion on what sort of retirement, surviving spouse and children, and disability insurance system we want, and I might agree with the idea that Social Security requires an overhaul, my issue is with the global statement that "retirement is a stupid idea."

The issue of retirement is an intensely personal one. [Full disclosure: I am happily retired.] In some professions, working until very late in life isn't unusual. One of my favorite Christian apologists, John Lennox, is 80 and continues to teach, write, and debate (check him out, he won't disappoint). Most of us, though, don't have professional lives like his. They may not be intellectually challenging and could be more physically demanding. 

Shapiro throws in the "some sort of health problem" exception. If you have dealt with the Social Security disability system, you know the difficulties involved in substantiating a work-limiting disability. More to the point, if you are in construction, the building trades, manufacturing, or any number of other jobs, you acquire injuries over a lifetime of work that don't necessarily prevent you from working but make work painful. 

But what if you're just tired of the grind and want to spend time with family, develop a hobby, travel, or whatever? What makes forcing that person to work better than allowing them to retire and make way for a younger worker? Assuming you have the resources to retire, what makes that a bad decision? One of the meritorious concepts behind Social Security was not only the idea that the elderly who worked in low-paying jobs should have something of a secure retirement with a modicum of dignity but that giving people over 65 an incentive to leave the workforce was great for increasing opportunities for younger workers. 

While Shapiro's experience with retirees is negative:

 Everybody that I know who is -- who is elderly, who has retired, is dead within five years. And if you talk to people who are elderly and they lose their purpose in life by losing their job and they stop working, things go to hell in a handbasket real quick.

That is anecdotal and outside the norm. Studies have found that retiring, especially early, increases longevity and improves mental health outcomes.

If you want to work beyond usual retirement, by all means do. Nothing in the current system forces people to retire. But let's not forget that the necessity of work is one of the byproducts of the Fall of Man and Original Sin (Genesis 3:17-19). Many people work to live; they don't live to work. Having done both, I find the former preferable to the latter.

Not only is bashing retirement a bad social policy, but it is also injurious to conservatism. Social Security—and the idea of being able to punch out of the workforce at 67 (no, it hasn't been 65 for quite some time)—is a popular program. Attacking it without offering anything other than "work till you drop dead" is not going to win votes, and it will discredit any other ideas you may have. Shapiro's statement drew this op-ed in USA Today that shows just how well it fits into the progressive narrative about the GOP.

We Americans are meant to work endlessly and tirelessly, as dictated by people like Trump, Johnson and Shapiro, inspirational leaders with smooth hands who’ve never been inconvenienced by perspiration.

That’s probably why so many Republicans across the country have been pushing to loosen child labor laws. If infants weren’t meant to work in coal mines, it wouldn’t be so easy to plop them in buckets and lower them down. That’s just science.

I believe every American child, teenager, adult and nonagenarian should be working at all times, without rest, until they expire, and I’m delighted to see the Republican Party agrees. I left the womb and went straight to work as a day care security guard, and, God willing, I’ll enter the ground wrapping up a few remaining work tasks. Entitlements are for ne’er-do-wells and retirement is for snowflakes. Vote Republican, people. Then proudly work your way to the grave.

Hyperbole, for sure, but if you think hyperbole doesn't make effective advertising, you haven't been paying attention. Remember this from the Medicare debate?

No matter what you think about Social Security, retirement is not a stupid idea. It is an idea and objective as old as our nation and our culture. Calling it stupid, in the words of Talleyrand, "is worse than a crime; it is a blunder."

But if retirement is a stupid idea, then Joe Biden is what that idea gets you. A man hanging onto a job long past the point of usefulness because he has nothing else to do.

TRANSCRIPT

BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): And let's be real about this - it's insane that we haven't raised the retirement age in the United States. It's totally crazy. Joe Biden -- if that were the case, Joe Biden should not be running for president. OK? Joe Biden is 81 years old. The retirement age in the United States, at which you start to receive Social Security and you are eligible for Medicare, is 65. Joe Biden has technically been eligible for Social Security and Medicare for 16 years, and he wants to continue in office until he is 86, which is 19 years past when he would be eligible for retirement. No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem. Everybody that I know who is -- who is elderly, who has retired, is dead within five years. And if you talk to people who are elderly and they lose their purpose in life by losing their job and they stop working, things go to hell in a handbasket real quick.

But put all of that aside, just on a fiscal level and on a logical level, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt established 65 as the retirement age, the average life expectancy in the United States was 63 years old. Today, the average life expectancy in the United States is close to 80. It's totally insane that you believe that you should be able to work from the time that you are essentially 20 to the time that you are 65 -- which is a 45 year period -- pay in, and then you'll receive Social Security benefits sufficient to support you and your family, you and your wife or whatever, for, like, another 20 years. That's crazy talk. That is not fiscally sustainable. The notion that if you have to raise the retirement age to 67 or 68, that everyone is gonna fall apart -- my parents are that age. My parents are not retired, and they shouldn't retire. It would be very bad for them to retire.

By the way, it's disrespectful to people who are 67, 68, 69 years old to suggest that they are in the same shape as people who are 65 -- were in 1940. It's not true at all. Have you met a 65 year old lately? 65 year-olds are not old in the United States. They're not. 68 year-olds are not old in the United States. Again, Joe Biden thinks he's not old, and that dude is running for president again, and that dude actually is old, and he's 81. I fail to see how a country in which our entire leadership class is 80 plus is telling you that we should have a retirement age of 65. It makes no sense at all.