@Soleron, while your views might represent the private market decently, you are failing to realize the entire job market. Take my degree for instance (Wildlife and Fisheries Management). Sure I could find a private sector job that might stick up for the environment (while most private jobs involving this degree probably would be arguing for more lax rules) but there are very few. My main chance to use my degree would be working as a park ranger, controlled burn specialist, zoo keeper, etc. My degree mainly involves public jobs. Wildlife jobs are one of the first to be cut and if there are a bunch of old park rangers staying in their job then that means no job for me. Try getting a job in the Wildlife sector that adheres to your values then get back to me. Sure I probably chose a terrible degree but it is the old people staying in their jobs that is keeping me from being able to obtain a wildlife job.  Case in point there isn't enough wildlife jobs for all the wildlife majors.

I disagree, there aren't enough jobs and the more people we get out of jobs with retirement the more jobs there are for the young.  Though the greater problem is the blue collar work has been shrunk down.  Too many people getting degrees, masters, PH.d's, not enough jobs for them, no other jobs for them to fall back on (Since, they're all over seas).  So what do people do?  Like I'd agree about the retirement age, but when it come down to it, there just aren't any jobs and any little bit to free up jobs will help.

Look at it another way ...

For every person who is dependent on the system products and services have to cost more to cover the cost of supporting these people, and this makes these goods and services far less cost effective compared to international competitors. At the following dependency level, goods and services have to cost the following:

0% dependency: 100%
10% dependency: 111%
20% dependency: 125%
30% dependency: 142%
40% dependency: 166%
50% dependency: 200%
60% dependency: 250%
70% dependency: 333%
80% dependency: 500%
90% dependency: 1000%

We live in a society with an employment to population ratio of 58% and a government that accounts for (roughly) 40% of the work force, which combined puts our dependency at (roughly) 66%; if the employment to population ratio increased to 65%, and the government was reduced to 30% of the workforce, dependency would fall to (roughly) 45%. The net effect of this kind of a change would be the cost or producing goods and services within our economy falling by (roughly) 40%; and goods and services would be far more cost effective to produce within the economy (increasing national and international demand), and people would be able to afford more goods because they were spending less on the goods they were buying (increasing national and international demand), and it would be easy to justify hiring more employees at most companies.

Costs of goods always go up due to national inflation and market conditions, there is no situation where the costs of goods will go down.  Plus corporate greed which cause the majority of jobs to be shipped to India and China will always keep jobs low in most countries.

No one said there were an infinite number of wildlife jobs.

Economics, and the creation of wealth is not zero-sum. Just because there may be a hard cap on some jobs (say doctorates queer/feminist history and gender studies) doesn't mean that there can't be jobs for, say, nuclear physists or oil engineers. The number of available jobs will skyrocket in the next 50 years as we head out into space, making employment virtually limitless - if you're willing to get the right jobs.

As for the pension dillema - this shows you why you can't guarentee benefits for life when you haven't actually created the retirement account for the worker. Everyone loves to rip on 401Ks and how the stock market is a poor way to retire, yet public pensions are far worse - at least 401Ks have actual funding behind them.

I'm not talking about inflation, I'm talking about real prices ...

Look at it this way, to give a employee a certain standard of living you have to pay for that standard of living, enough to cover their student loans, their retirement, and the taxes to cover government "funded" heatlhcare, retirements and higher eduction. This massive bloat on the cost to hire someone translates into the potential employee not being cost effective against international competition who don't have these costs.

If you push to have people retire earlier, or stay in school longer, you just increase the cost of employing people and drive companies to hire more people outside of the country.

Yes, that's why a certain amount of money needs to be printed without penalty and distributed.  No matter what happens millions of people are born yearly, they'll all need a salary to live and that money just doesn't exist.  You can delay it, take away pensions, but it's only gonna delay needing to pay people.  And to touch upon international competition, how can you compete with a minimum wage of let's say 10.45/h (Minimum wage in the province I live in) vs 2.00/h in China (Current wage of Foxcon employees)?  Corporate greed caused business men to run out of most first world countries, up until the last 30 years business were making money and paying people proper saleries.  Economics ultimately goes back to people buying goods.  Move jobs over seas to save costs is good short term, but if you cut people's pay they're going to be buying less.  Buying less leads to less profits, and these "smart" business men deal with that buy cutting wages and getting rid of employees reducing spending money which causes even less profits.  When this happens the government has to step in which causes the government to spend even more and cut taxes to try to alleviate the burden off of people.  Less taxes means less revenue to spend, less revenue to spend and higher spending causes these huge deficits (Which is why the governments of most countries are in shambles).  Which leads back to corporate greed cutting out most jobs and having people retire early will free up jobs, even if a little (A complete overhaul and proper regulations and getting rid of free trades will solve a lot of issues, but that's a different discussion).

You see the symptom but you don't see the cause ...

In China you pay an employee to support his family

In the western world you pay an employee to support his family, retirees, people on welfare, government bureaucrats, students in gender studies, and so on

For example, GM's labour costs are roughly $70/hour per employee while employees earn between $15 and $30 per hour; and their take-home pay is probably closer to $10 to $20 an hour. GM has no problem supplying these employees with a take home income of $10 to $20 per hour, but paying them $70 per hour to cover everyone else is asking a lot.