The idea behind allowing investment of some Social Security funds is to allow, not mandate, individuals to do this. All proposed concepts are voluntary. You don't wanna do it, don't. How you consider it "looting" my money when I voluntarily put my own money into stocks of my own choosing, and don't consider it "looting" when the government forces the money from me at the point of a gun, indicates some rather odd definition of "looting" that I haven't heard of yet.

Of course, if you consider all of my wealth to be the rightful property of the State, then any of it that I put somewhere else would, of course, be considered by the State to have been "looted" from the State. Maybe that's it?

What is suppressed in this discussion is that money invested in the private sector is put to work to create actual wealth. You end up with more real wealth than you started with. Money that goes to the government is simply handed out to other voters. Wealth is moved around, but never grows. Granted, stocks can go down as well as up, but at least there's the option of growth, and stocks have always moved up in the long run. Besides, the investor may choose more mundane and reliable investments, like money market funds, or others. You see, they get to choose.

Most importantly, this fund would be your money, which can go to your heirs if you die before you get to the age where Social Security is paid out. If this happens under the current system, all the money you dumped into Social Security all your life goes up in smoke. I think that this aspect of privatization is not played up nearly enough.

You express concern about corruption, and rightfully so. I agree that large chunks of money do tend to erode the honesty of many people, both inside and outside of government.

I would support privatization of the Social Security system under only one condition: the investments must be left only up to the individuals. If only certain "selected" investments are deemed to be legitimate, or much worse, the money is given to the government for them to put in private investments of the government's choice, then the opportunity for fraud and corruption is obvious.