I'm not an employee or a boomer, but I do take exception with this zero-sum view. Productivity creates more opportunities. These people are not taking away a slice of the pie from young people. Instead they are creating a larger pie for everyone.
I have relatives who work for a police department. There are some people who have put in their 30 years (or whatever it is) and are entitled to collect most of their salary for the rest of their lives once they retire. But they don’t want to retire, so they continue to work basically for free. If they retired, somebody new would be hired to take their position. For jobs like that, it’s a zero-sum game.
Public or government managed positions are a bit of an exception. For the sake of illustration, I'll make an attempt. Of course this is strictly hypothetical.
The increased public safety from your experienced relative could create other opportunities in the city, such as a thriving retail sector. Whereas without that standard of public safety, shoplifting or other petty criminal activity might drive retailers away.
You can claim that the overall demand for police officers would be one less in this scenario. However the demand for retail employment and the demand for those goods sold by retail shops might increase. Therefore, the overall size of the pie has increased. We can extrapolate a few levels from this point. A growing retail sector might necessitate further public or private security roles.
Of course as with any example, there are probably several approaches to produce gotcha counter arguments. This is only meant to illustrate the larger point and not argue the specifics of the example.
I don’t think I explained it well. The employee is working for free from their perspective, not the county’s.
The employee could retire and collect 100% pension or they can continue to work and collect around the same amount of money as salary. If they don’t retire, then the budget hasn’t been freed up to hire the new person.
It’s different budgets, but it’s the same amount of tax money either way, so arguably it shouldn’t make a difference from the employer’s side as well. The budgets just would need to be organized differently.
This is assuming that more opportunities are being created in certain roles... Unfortunately there aren't being more house representatives, senators, etc. Professorships are increasingly rare. While you can argue that, roundaboutly, boomer executives and boomer equity owners (e.g. partners in law offices) can invest in more companies that will create new executive rooms and new partnership positions, the reality is we are actually seeing more and more corporate mergers which means less positions for upwards mobility.
Which is the objective we seek, full employment regardless of productivity concerns or productive allocations of finite resources?
I'd suggest that productive allocations increase our living standards, which is the goal of employment itself. Full employment for the sake of employment trends towards make-work, drudgery, high costs and low quality.
