ABSTRACT
Reducing mandatory contributions, while also improving social justice, is the best possible way to bring the growth enjoyed by the rest of the world to an aging Europe. The engineering approach to economic, social and employment policy is woefully underdeveloped. Jacques Rueff has studied the formation of rights, at the junction of the economic and legal sciences. Contributory retirement funds are unfortunately governed by the administered economy, which ignores the basic rules for regulating economic and social systems. The administration severs the link between the utility of its members and the rights it gives them to national production; it treats productive and nonproductive workers the same way, as long as they have the same diploma or have passed the same civil service exam. In France, the first retirement funds were not contributory, but based on capitalization: factory workers' and farmers' retirement in 1910, then old-age insurance in 1930.
