While we’re all celebrating 70 years with Social Security, we should reflect on how close we came to losing the little dear in infancy. Four mean old members of the Supreme Court wanted to strangle it in 1937 on the grounds that the Constitution doesn’t give Congress any authority to establish a mandatory retirement program for citizens. Had SS been passed a year earlier and the Court heard the case (Helvering v. Davis) prior to the famous Switch, maybe we would have been spared the ordeal of living with SS.