But, if that is your big sticking point, you can literally load up on the cans of pork and beans as your retirement fund.

"Savings account" is an abstraction for that, and it's important to realize how abstractions leak and fail, but for most people the abstraction is just fine.

And if everyone doesn't do that, there is a very good chance you can withdraw your money and buy some pork and beans.

Which is the point about leaky abstractions. Unless you believe there is a significant chance your scenario will play out, the distinction isn't very meaningful.

But, they won't. Not everyone is of the same age, for one. So, it's an abstraction that usually works.

Instead of accumulating pork bellies, you can accumulate pork belly futures. This is another abstraction. Not everyone can do this at once, either, but the price of pork belly futures will rise in response, telling people to stop accumulating so much of that good.

It feels like you are saying -- based on my experience talking with other people who think economics is just a sham, so perhaps I'm too sensitive to that and applying their thinking to you, unfairly -- that any savings are just a confidence game. This is what I'm arguing against.

That isn't to say that savings isn't an abstraction for something. Saving money in financial instruments isn't a "savings" game. It's a growth game. By saving, you make available capital. That capital goes towards growing the economy. Ideally, the growth in future production resulting from your capital offsets the share of production you take out in retirement. It's this element of growth that distinguishes financial savings from "savings" in the pork and beans sense.

And this is one of the good things about a capitalist free market, it reaches certain efficiencies and spreads the risk (and rewards) across the whole economy (and all its participants).