Social Insurance and the Economization of Citizenship: Toward a New Political Economy of Moral Worth

T.H. Marshall famously defined citizenship as a status endowing equal rights to all members of a polity regardless of social class or attributions of moral desert.  With respect to poor citizens from whom basic livelihood and even minimal well-being has been so regularly withheld, history has long accustomed us to the violation of this normative ideal.  Publicly justified by the perverse incentives to government dependency and further impoverishment said to be the effects of those very rights, in reality it is the lack of moral worth that poverty and rights-claimancy signifies that explains the betrayal. 

Long insulated from this means-tested withholding of moral worth have been the beneficiaries of America’s universal programs of social insurance, distinguished from welfare by their contributory requirements and semblance of quid pro quo contractualism.  But for the first time, both these programs and the claimants themselves have become targets of attack. Accusations of freeloading, social parasitism, and moral unworth have been democratized, no longer restricted to the poor but now extended to once-thought invulnerable social insurance beneficiaries, including those claiming unemployment insurance, social security disability insurance, even the much beloved Medicare and social security programs. 

In this extension of moral condemnation—from the relatively few defenseless poor to the entire universe of social state claimants and beneficiaries—we are witnessing a new political economy of moral worth and a full-scale economization of citizenship. All claimants and beneficiaries of public social programs are increasingly subject to a new level of shaming, humiliation, and blame—a new political economy that operates at two registers. First, micro individual moral worth is withheld in direct proportion to the insufficiency of absolute autonomy to sustain a livelihood—regardless of decades of contributory taxation. Second, at a more unfamiliar macro level, the nature of the blame leveled against those deemed morally suspect has widened and transformed. Whereas the brief against welfare recipients was their own profligacy and indolence, today social insurance beneficiaries are being blamed for macroeconomic woes, slow growth and unemployment; the “entitlement mentality” of beneficiaries is said to be depleting the public fisc and threatening the very survival of the nation by turning America into Greece. In this new political economy of moral worth, citizenship has been economized: It is no longer about rights off-setting the effects of economic distribution but rather a commitment to channeling all economic resources to the cause of servicing the national debt. In this new economization of citizenship, equal moral worth is endowed only to those willing to sacrifice their rights for the health and prosperity of the economy.

This paper examines in depth and analyzes the causes and consequences of this new political economy of moral unworthiness in which the equal moral worth of citizenship can be attained only by relinquishing Marshall’s famous rights for the sake of the nation’s economic survival.