The average American life expectancy is now about 77.5 years, following a recent dip after the COVID pandemic savagely attacked America’s elderly. Life expectancy has been steadily rising in most countries throughout the world, but especially in the developed world. While living to 90 was once a pretty big deal and living past 100 was virtually unheard of outside of Japan, it is now more common and will become even more so in the coming years. Advances in medical technology, pharmaceuticals, molecular sciences, and even nutrition and diets are reshaping the process of aging in our lifetimes. We still can’t beat death, and aging has health consequences, but we are pushing the boundaries and living longer and better lives.

There are corresponding changes in what old age is, and what living older is like. As our lives extend and the quality of our lives continues to improve, there are shifts in our understanding of a normal life cycle: how long we should work, when we should start families, how long individuals can live independently, and what the age thresholds should be for Social Security and Medicare.

As birth rates decline globally, the cost of having children continues to increase, and families wait longer to have children, we will be forced to rethink aging. Our workforce will be grayer, retirements will need to be pushed back, and we will have to accept leaders in all walks of life who are much older than previous generations would have accepted. Since the elderly have more economic power and vote with greater frequency, we can expect our political classes to gray. But this is not a simple transition, because aging still means the prospect of diminished capacity, energy, and ability.

In fact, we just recently had a stark contrast between two widely known, older public figures who served in very prominent leadership roles but with now very different legacies that illustrate some difficult decisions we will be forced to make about the place of the elderly in America. At the ripe old age of 94, Warren Buffett, the greatest investor of all time, recently announced to a stunned audience at the annual shareholder meeting for Berkshire Hathaway that he would be stepping down as CEO. The group sat silently after he told them the news and then erupted in appreciative applause for the billions in wealth he had created for his shareholders and society at large.

Buffett’s long-time partner, Charlie Munger, passed away at 99 just a year before the announcement, and the two of them had overseen an increase in Berkshire’s stock to the tune of 5,502,284 percent from 1960 (when Buffett took control of the company) to today. If you’d invested 100 dollars in the company in 1960, it would now be worth about 5.5 million. Their performance as investors is unmatched in the modern world. While everyone in the audience knew that eventually Buffett would have to step down, no one was clamoring for it. The surprise among the attendees reflected that.

Contrast this with the end of the Biden presidency as seen through the first of several upcoming books about the Weekend at Bernie’s nature of his term in office. Biden entered office as the oldest president ever (until 2024), and while there were vague concerns about his energy level and engagement, those were set aside in the wake of the mishandling of the COVID pandemic by the first Trump administration, and the fact that Biden was able to “campaign” in relative seclusion because of the pandemic policies of lockdowns and isolation. In short, America didn’t get a full picture of Biden physically or mentally, and voted retrospectively to reject Trump.

As more and more information becomes public, it’s increasingly clear that Biden had lost the physical and mental abilities to be president well before the 2024 election. A small group of advisors shielded him from the media and other political leaders. The media itself was complicit in the cover-up. Rather than questioning if the president was up for the job, coverage served to push a narrative of capacity and leadership that simply didn’t reflect reality.

In theory, the Constitution has been amended to deal with instances in which the president is incapacitated or unable to serve. After the assassination of President Kennedy, Congress began work on drafting an amendment to handle such an event. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was passed in 1967, and there are two key elements to it. The first is known as Section 3. This part of the amendment allows the president to delegate his power to the vice president for a temporary period because he believes he will be unable to serve due to a medical procedure. Presidents Reagan, W. Bush, and Biden were among the presidents who have temporarily granted their VPs presidential powers for surgeries. There is also Section 4, which has never been used. Section 4 states that if the VP and Cabinet deem the president unable to serve, they must inform Congress, which must vote within 21 days to potentially strip the sitting president of the office if all agree he cannot adequately serve.

But neither Section 3 nor Section 4 is relevant for the Biden case. He clearly was beyond temporarily incapacitated, but the actions of his staff throughout the second part of his term completely precluded applying Section 4 as well. Would Vice President Harris and the Cabinet have agreed in 2023, after all of them were arguing vociferously that Biden was fit to serve, that in fact they’d been lying all along and he wasn’t? Would two-thirds of Congress, which would have necessitated a number of Democratic votes, have agreed? Absolutely not. Instead, Biden drifted into a gray zone, not unlike an older grandparent one sees at Thanksgiving or Christmas. He was someone who could still occasionally tell a good story, complain about refereeing during the holiday football game, and pleasantly share a meal; however, he certainly wasn’t someone you’d want with the nuclear codes or managing complex policy. 

In short, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a black and white, yes-or-no way to deal with a president in a coma or with an obvious medical condition. Since even Biden’s doctors were claiming he was “fit to serve,” the cause for invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment would have led to a national crisis and partisan war.

Buffett was a fully engaged leader of a company worth more than $355 billion. He was constantly being tested by the challenges that emerged from being in the market. If his acumen and abilities were slipping, his colleagues and investors would have been pressured by market forces to make changes. And certainly, politics is not something that can be phoned in. Presidents have myriad responsibilities, and the job famously grays the hair of the young men who have assumed the office in recent years. And yet if a president loses it mentally while in office, we have no reason to believe we have the institutional means to address it, because we just saw that the available safeguards failed. Those around Biden who were shielding him held onto power and ignored their responsibilities to the American republic, focusing instead on their own self-interest.

The architects of our political and social institutions have focused almost exclusively on preventing individuals who are too young from having a significant influence on policy and politics. The American Founders set a minimum age for being president, for example. Conservative thinkers have long valued experience and wisdom.

Perhaps the best-known example of this was Hayek’s suggestion that there should be an upper chamber of a legislature stocked with older leaders, for an extended term which would insulate it from political pressures. Hayek believed, we can now naively see, that older individuals would be more statesman-like, above the fray of petty political fights with the longer wisdom of age.

How much have our views changed about who is “old” and who isn’t? In Hayek’s three-volume work Law, Legislation and Liberty, he proposes a legislature in which all the entering members would be 45 years old and serve 15 years until they are sixty. The citizens who would elect them would also be 45 years old. The practical effect would be to allow each age cohort to have representation in the congress for 15 years. Hayek believed that after 60, we couldn’t count on legislators to govern effectively. While he didn’t have a maximum age per se, his thinking was that the older generation would pass the torch and stroll gracefully into the sunset.

Consider the number of individuals currently serving in our legislatures who would be disqualified under such a system. The average age of the US Senate today is now 64, and that’s actually down from the past few years, as older Senators have died and left office. Politicians are living longer and holding onto office longer. Chuck Grassley is 91. Would Mitch McConnell really be stepping aside were it not for obvious health issues? How long would Dianne Feinstein have served had the same circumstances forced her to announce her retirement before she died in office? We certainly don’t face a crisis of youth and inexperience in our political leadership. After Biden, the American electorate chose Donald Trump again, who began his term older than Biden was when he entered the Oval Office. Americans are choosing to stick with our geriatric rulers.

Since we don’t see any end to this trend, what are the alternatives? What should liberty-oriented individuals think about this? Many people reflexively point to term limits as a solution, and proposals for them were very popular in the late twentieth century. But as the public increasingly selects older office holders, are such ideas feasible or likely? It seems to me they are not.

I can envision several ideas that might help. The first would be a mandatory neurological assessment for any president, regardless of age. Alzheimer’s symptoms can begin to appear in individuals as young as 50. It seems highly prudent to demand that individuals who command the world’s largest military submit to a regular exam administered by a cross-section of leading physicians to prevent having an obviously compromised leader in the White House again. We also should require that the entirety of the president’s annual physical examination be made public, and presidents should be required to disclose any long-term conditions that might undermine their ability to lead. Finally, we could apply criminal penalties to those hiding those conditions in the White House staff or to the presidents themselves. At first glance, this may seem drastic, but it could also be necessary to prevent another repeat of the debacle of Biden’s family and staff carting him out in public for embarrassing episodes and then vociferously claiming he was vigorous and capable.

At some point, we are very likely to face another administration like the one we just endured, in which a clearly incapable, elderly, mentally compromised individual will be entrusted with the presidency. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment seems designed to deal with a crisis, not a slow decline in the cognitive ability of the president. Short of the above-mentioned institutional changes, we are facing the same questions about our presidents as we do about our aging parents and grandparents. Some of them voluntarily give up their car keys and move into senior living. Others do not. Some can make these choices with reasonable judgment, and some families have to convince their parents to change their lives.

Politicians are not angels, and the Founders knew this. They are ambitious, self-interested people, just like Warren Buffett. We can’t count on them wisely handing over power. We need both a more robust way to assess how our leaders are doing and a way to address when they are not up to the job. Otherwise, we may get another “Weekend at Biden’s” presidency, and the results may be even worse than the ones we are experiencing now.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.