The EEF's formidable report on pensions comes with a thoughtful appendix on how to get people to go on working for longer than they do now - a "double win", it says, in that they would pay taxes, National Insurance and pension contributions for the extra years, and live for a shorter time drawing pensions.
It then spells out the difficulties - problems older people have finding work, employers thinking they are less productive and more expensive - mostly based on misconceptions.
But it also faces up to the unpalatable fact that there will always be people who just don't want to work "because they have simply had enough of it".
The appendix discusses ways to make work less unattractive for them, but never considers anything resembling compulsion.
The main body of the report is not so squeamish. Its centrepiece is a compulsory levy of two per cent of everybody's earnings, rising over ten years to four per cent, with employers pitching in the same again.
It acknowledges that just as some people have had enough of work, a large number just don't want to put money aside for their old age. The report concludes - along with a growing chorus of the great and the good - that this is precisely why contributions for a pension to top up the basic state stipend must be compulsory.
They take it for granted that it is the Government's job to rescue people from their own deliberate folly. Persuade them by all means, while remembering the mis-selling that followed the Thatcher Government's crass campaign for personal pensions.
There is a better case for offering tax breaks too good to refuse and conversely for raising more taxes to fund a less miserly basic state pension.
But it is outright tyranny to say "We know better than you what to do with the money you have left after tax. We forbid you to touch it until you are old".
