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The most provocative part of the book is Mr. Greenspan’s assertion that government spending on Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs is the reason that the American economy has grown more slowly in recent decades. He writes that taxation of upper-income households is reducing their ability to invest in new ideas and new machines and new buildings. Less investment yields less innovation, slower growth in productivity and less economic growth.

With an economist’s precision, he calculates that this decline in investment has reduced growth since 1965 by 0.21 percentage points a year — “a consequential difference,” he writes, of about $1.1 trillion in lost output.

Americans must choose, he writes: “Do we wish a society of dependence on government or a society based on the self-reliance of individual citizens?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/books/the-map-and-the-territory-by-alan-greenspan.html

People are paid what they are worth to the person paying them. Choices are: take freedom away andforce people to pay someone more than they are worth or improve employee skills so you are worth more.

Long term ANY AND ALL government meddling slows economic growth.

Going global is the way. If you only depend on local that what happens to a country as a whole. But when Business Process Outsourcing is alive, then it would not really be a great problem.

Is this really what Mr. Greenspan wrote? Because SS has a fairly low maximum cap (~$15k per person per year), and Medicare is less than 3% of income tax, although it recently received a hefty increase. Neither affects capital gains. No, SS is probably not ideal, and no, the SS program did not take well into account increasing lifespans and such, but it and Medicare are hardly the cause of over-taxation of the rich. Sounds more like a call to make the working class work until the day they die.

Really?  Breaking up trusts in the 19th century slowed economic growth?

To say something like this requires you be so ignorant of history I'm not even sure how to respond.

So historical oppression of the productive industrial, and merchant classes by the pre-18th century aristocracies (which didn't actually produce anything or run their own companies) was completely justified because they were paying what the work "was worth".

Or better yet plantation owners were justified in paying slaves nothing because their work "was worth" nothing?

Not the way the world works...

EDIT:and just to front-off the typical bullshit slavery counterargument "this is different because its institutionalized oppression".  After abolition blacks were still payed nothing and forced through inventive debt schemes to stay at the plantations they worked at as slaves.

It has nothing to do with governments, it is banks who are not willing to loan caused slow growth, currently only government is borrowing

Self-reliance? How?

I'm sure that majority of population can't be self-reliant. There isn't just land and resources for low efficency food production. And then there is the other basics needs.

So the options are either some form of social security or worse safety...

and war expense,
and ecologic expense,
and drug war expense,
and stupid regulation enforcing expense,
and control anything move expense...

one time it must slow growth...
i live in France and here if you earn around 2000€ a month, near of 80% of your paycheck go on taxes...

how that can't slow grow ?
do you think because you are american the same economic law don't apply ?

nothing is given for free, it's just steal from other people.

its a sick country and a sick system, where only the $ is important.

+1

The US needs a new TR.

If any country in the world has the land to have an entirely self reliant population, it is the US.  But our food habits would have to change.  You can feed 100 people for a year on the grain it takes to feed 1 cow for a year.  The cow can feed 100 people once, but then you have 364 days left.

why do you want change people habits ?
world population isn't food self reliant ?