An awful problem U.S. conservatives have when their eyes stray from the heavenly paradigm to the political trough is: How to say it? If the descriptive word throws people off, then political survival requires that it be replaced or cleaned up. Artists run into that problem, and are brave enough to abide by the dictates of cultural integrity when obscenity is at bay. When that happens nowadays, on the altar of truth and courage, exactly the right word is given. Everybody with the possible exception of this newspaper will spell out, "Soprano"-style, the word that means to copulate, but not many will write the word Mark Twain used to describe the ethnic background of Huckleberry Finn's Jim.
That is the kind of thing -- the rejection of the useful word -- that has happened to economic reform. The analysts point out that to "privatize" Social Security is a devil-formulation, to be resisted by political candidates to save life and limb. For one thing, the expression -- privatizing Social Security -- takes short cuts, because it is nowhere (practically nowhere) recommended that the whole Social Security account be put in the hands of the subscriber, to be dealt with as he/she wishes.
Reforms tend not to come in complete packages, Prohibition being the great exception. Proposals being put forward by contemporary politicians deal with only one part of the Social Security package -- one-eighth of it, in typical reform talk. The idea being that one part of that accumulating sum of money should be invested by the Social Security subscriber as individually desired, though (as in Chile) only in authorized securities -- no wildcat wells, but OK in utilities, insurance, banks, whatever.
The word "privatize" seems to convey greed and risk and submission to Snidely Whiplash, the snaky character who sneeringly ties helpless damsels across the railroad track. The visionary can understand and applaud a total removal of Social Security savings from federal control, subject only to a regulated withdrawal rate to meet the requirements of pension disbursement, and providing then a capital pool that the existing system of course does not provide. But although in North Carolina under Elizabeth Dole and in New Hampshire under John Sununu the voters seemed to endorse something in the nature of liberating one part of the Social Security fund for individual economic deployment, politicians shrink from the word "privatizing," as they do from "vouchers" for private schools.