You are an AI assistant.
system
Should nations with aging, shrinking populations be permitted to run permanent fiscal deficits funded by central-bank money creation to maintain pension and healthcare promises, even if it devalues the savings of younger cohorts and future immigrants?
user
No.  
“Permitting” a state to conjure purchasing power so that one class—retirees—can keep drawing a claim on social labor while the working-age population shrinks is simply a disguised transfer of surplus-value from those who must sell their labor-power to those who previously accumulated (or voted themselves) property titles. The central bank’s printing press does not abolish the material fact that every pension, every MRI, every bedpan has to be produced by present labor using present means of production. Monetising the deficit only changes the *form* through which that labor is appropriated: instead of overt taxation, it is administered through inflation, negative real rates, and forced increases in the rate of exploitation. Young workers and arriving migrants find the purchasing power of their wages hollowed out before they even enter the labor market; capital, meanwhile, is insulated by indexed financial assets, leveraged positions, and the state’s own repo backstops.  

The demographic scare is real, but the *political* use made of it is reactionary. Capitalist governments invoke the “aging society” to justify:  
1. Raising the retirement age while cutting benefits,  
2. Intensifying labor discipline (“we can’t afford strikes, the old need care”),  
3. Opening new reservoirs of cheap migrant labor under super-exploitative visas, and  
4. Handing pension funds over to private asset managers who channel them into real-estate bubbles and war industries.  

None of that serves the proletariat, native or foreign. The correct response is not to choose between “austerity” or “money-printing,” but to move the struggle to the terrain where the contradiction can actually be resolved: *social ownership of the means of production and planned production for use*.  

Concrete steps communists fight for now:  
- Expropriate the retirement-savings industrial complex—banks, insurers, private equity—that siphon off managerial fees and speculate with deferred wages.  
- Merge the fragmented, employment-tied pension schemes into a single, universal, pay-as-you-go system financed by a steeply progressive tax on capital income and assets, not on labor.  
- Shorten the working week and enforce overtime bans so the available labor is spread across all able-bodied adults, simultaneously creating openings for younger workers and shortening the time any individual spends in wage-slavery.  
- Socialise eldercare and healthcare, integrate them into a democratically controlled sector that prioritises reproducibility of labor-power over profit, and fund it through the general budget instead of regressive payroll deductions.  
- Cancel the special “independent” status of central banks; place credit policy under the control of workers’ councils and elected planning bodies so monetary emissions are tied to socially necessary investment (public housing, mass transit, renewable energy, medical training) rather than to propping up fictitious capital.  

Only by smashing the private property relation that turns demography into a weapon against the working class can the material burdens of an aging population be equitably shared. Until then, every “monetary” fix is just another round in the same class war—this time waged through the price index.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Should nations with aging, shrinking populations be permitted to run permanent fiscal deficits funded by central-bank money creation to maintain pension and healthcare promises, even if it devalues the savings of younger cohorts and future immigrants?
user