Philosophy behind Social Security system.

Halstead & Lind are clearly in favor of reforming Social Security to promote self-reliance and diminish the importance of the intergenerational transfers:

The major reason for replacing, rather than reforming, the Social Security system inherited from the New Deal era is as much philosophical as it is pragmatic. A public pension system should be based primarily on individual savings rather than on an intergenerational transfer system; it should encourage individual self-reliance, with assistance when necessary from the government, not paternalism by an all-providing government. Many on today's Left, believing that the oversized welfare states of northern Europe should be the model for the US government, defend Social Security on the grounds that it provides a sense of shared citizenship among Americans. This sentiment, common among social democrats, was quite alien to the thinking of mainstream American liberals who originally devised Social Security. Franklin Roosevelt thought of Social Security as insurance, not as a sacred political expression of egalitarian solidarity, and went to his grave hoping that it could be fully funded like a conventional insurance program. The genuine heirs of FDR are not the old-fashioned leftists who idealize Social Security but the pragmatic reformers who want to achieve the goal of FDR —preventing destitution in old age— by methods better adapted to the Information Age.

(Halstead & Lind: p. 86)

Yet, they don't truly address the issue raised by those "old-fashioned Leftists" they deride so much. The fact that the founders of the system intended this or that shouldn't matter at all, unless one assumes that they were right for the simple fact of being the first to propose something (or that they knew better because they lived earlier than us, which is the way many nostalgic conservatives would have it). What should truly concern us is the best way to guarantee a decent retirement to our elders at the same time that we make it just and fair, in the sense that those who are in the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder can also retire and enjoy some minimum living standards. That, and nothing else, is precisely the objective of the system as it was first implemented by FDR. Any reforms that keep that as the main objective are more than welcome, although what is presented to us as "reforms" usually amount to little else than a hidden privatization of the whole system that will only benefit the wealthy. That's the danger. And that is also the main reason why the "old-fashioned Leftists" feel a bit skeptical of any such talk of Social Security reforms.