Income as a Social Right: Preliminaries
Money and Membership
Post 17: 22 April 2025
Should we have a social right to a minimum income? Today I continue my examination of Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights by considering the extent to which we have a duty to ensure that everyone in our society has a certain income and, if so, how we should think about setting that social minimum. This is a big topic. Today’s discussion will be preliminary. My goal is to lay out the set of questions that ought to determine good policy in this area. I’ll take up these questions one at a time in later posts.
As always, we should build from first principles. T.H. Marshall, who inspired my whole enterprise, argued that everyone ought to have “the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society.”1 The social rights of citizenship flow from this commitment. Our public duty to guarantee everyone a minimum income arises because it takes resources to participate in society fully and to exercise our civil and political rights fully.
What Money Buys
Income is only one element of this resource set, and it is not always the most important one. Income is only a means. Rights to other basic goods, such as a home, healthcare, an education, and even to meaningful work can be means as well, but they are also ends in themselves, commonly valued elements of a good life. Sometimes we convince ourselves that having a certain income or having access to a certain amount of money as wealth are elements of a good life, but that is actually never true, even if we tie our sense of self-worth up in it.
Money is valuable for what it can purchase. In our context, we are not interested in everything money can buy, only those things that are necessary for participating in society as a full and equal member. Sometimes this means we should demote the role of money altogether by identifying areas where we have placed unnecessary or avoidable monetary barriers to participation. We need to ask if a particular fee (or fine) helps to support a service or public good, or if it tends, like the poll tax, merely to exclude. If the revenue seems necessary, we need to ask if broader-based taxes would serve better. I am thinking especially about aspects of our shared public spaces. Some of these, like access to parks, community spaces, and events place small burdens on individuals. Others, like public transportation, may be a major household budget item.2
The sorts of membership-related things that require money fall into two broad classes. First, money plays a role in securing the other goods to which we have, or ought to have, a social right (housing, healthcare, education). Programs to bolster income will affect the economic markets for those other goods. Any plan for a universal income support program, like basic income, has to address this question first. Cash is valuable but should be approached as a residual element in a wholistic policy. In my view, the failure to entrench other social rights can make even very expensive cash transfer programs nearly useless. I’ll try to explain this more below.
Second, having income and/or wealth buys something over and beyond the set of core social goods. If we have money, we have a sense of security. The essence of economic security is confidence in our ability to maintain the fullest possible set of life choices in the future, even in the face of some, though certainly not all, economic and personal dislocations. This might be as simple as having enough in the bank to let you walk away from a bad job, or as complex as having a reasonable path toward starting your own business or buying a house.
Before moving on, we need to dismiss one destructive canard. Programs that involve some form of income assistance are often categorized, and attacked, as “redistribution.” This is true in a trivial way: almost all tax and spend programs involve net transfers of resources between social classes, generations, or geographic regions. We have seen that these often “redistribute” wealth upwards. This loses sight of what the income is for in the first place. Marshall is very clear that social rights are “not primarily a means of equalizing incomes” but rather are about “equality of status.”3 Whatever standard we adopt for income should be based only on the requirements of membership.4
Three Ways to Think About Income
Only one of FDR’s list of eight specific social rights deals directly with transfers of income to persons, framed entirely in terms of economic security:
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, and sickness, and accident and unemployment;
Four more items deal with economic life, including two related to entrepreneurship, which I discussed a few weeks ago, and two with wage labor:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The redundancy between “remunerative” and “earn enough” in these items confused me for a long time, but the two entries emphasize different rights. The first item, the first social right Roosevelt lists, is about access to decent work. It recognizes that people take meaning from useful work and ought to have a broad set of occupational choices in their lives. This does not fully resolve the job guarantee issue I raised in March but reframes the role of government in this mostly private domain.
The second item is about the right to decent pay. This is the main engine of income security in the Second Bill of Rights. Consistent with other New Deal thinking, and with the liberal approach to welfare states in general, FDR’s Bill of Rights makes a clear distinction between guarantees tied directly to current work—provided as a set of ground rules for labor-business and business-business interactions— and those that are provided to those who either can’t or can no longer work, typically in the form of cash. In this view, guarantees of non-exploitative wages will eliminate poverty, dependency, and economic insecurity for all workers, except in special circumstances. Mostly, earning “enough” just means an adequate minimum wage, but I argue that, in addition, this item implies the right to bargain collectively (though I do wish Roosevelt had listed that explicitly).
The economic security item, which lists classes of people who are not working—aged, sick, injured, disabled, or unemployed— is nonetheless tied to work. This comes at a cost. To receive the benefits to which it refers one must either have worked, indeed have worked extensively, or be unable to work. This has a semblance of universality that doesn’t hold up. There are classes of useful endeavor that do not, for one reason or another, qualify as “work.” These gaps can be shameful: The original Social Security Act, for example, excluded agricultural and domestic workers who were typically African American.5 More broadly, “work” is defined as paid work. This excludes unpaid caregiving, typically family caregiving, which has an obvious social value.
These sorts of gaps, along with the potential for multiple non-working statuses, suggest a third way of thinking about income supports: a universalistic system not explicitly tied to work. This idea has a long legacy, especially if we include “basic endowment” proposals (for lump-sum payments) as well as “basic income” ones.6 The structure of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights does not allow space for universal basic income (UBI), opting instead to use income transfer programs as a way to fill in gaps created by a system based on capitalist labor. We should take UBI proposals (and their cousins) seriously, however. There must be a place for programs like this, if only because so much of the labor we value in society does not fall under the umbrella of paid work. It may form part of the solution to our current crisis in childcare and family formation.
It should be obvious that a basic income only has value within the context of the protections provided by the full set of social rights. A minimum income without a minimum wage would probably not raise incomes much, if it all. Instead it would subsidize the wage bill faced by employers. Similarly, much of the value of a UBI provided in the context of our current set of housing policies would likely be captured by landlords as higher rents, leaving the renter class not much better off, if at all. One segment of those favoring UBI-type programs see them as substitutes for other social protections.7 That is, if we give people enough cash, we can drop or reduce programs for housing, health, education, and so on. This is my main fear about UBI proposals. Regardless of the intention of reformers, the actual implementation of UBI programs present this risk. That would be a disaster.
If we do UBI at all, it must be to complement the full set of social rights. It is reasonable to consider how minimum income guarantees interact with the event-specific income guarantees we have in some form now, such as worker’s compensation, unemployment insurance, and social security payments, and with ones that have been proposed, such a paid family leave and expanded child care credits. While the newer items also involve separation from the labor market, they generally include more elements of personal choice—to have a child or to care for a family member—where the older programs mostly conceptualized these transitions in terms of unchosen risks (though Social Security has always had elements of both).
The non-work items that comprise the rest of Roosevelt’s list concern social goods that incomes alone do not guarantee, that includes access to meaningful work. A taxonomy of these social rights begins to emerge from these considerations along a main work-community axis. See the sketch below. This is a good template for considering how social rights not explicitly listed or implicitly rejected by Roosevelt would fit in: UBI, for example, or guarantees of social rights centered around family formation.
I expect I will update this in the weeks to come. The main left-right axis could be restated in terms of the form of economic regulation required. Some level of public provision will almost always be needed at the “community” (left) end of the spectrum, either as the main provider of the critical good (education) or as an important complement to private markets that are incomplete in some way, with incompleteness understood either as a failure to serve all potential customers (that is, everyone, since everyone needs these things) or as critical market failures (as with medical insurance). At the “work” end (right) of the spectrum, the called for social rights mostly require regulatory public protections, clear rules-of-the-game standards, and less direct intervention.
This short discussion raises a number of narrower questions to explore in the weeks to come. A surprising number of these—surprising to me—concern universal basic income. These deserve their own post (or posts). To those I would add a related set of questions about “universal endowment” programs. These typically propose providing lump-sum “public inheritances” to young adults. Income is good, but some of the social rights we have talked about, like access to entrepreneurship and some forms of education, are episodic and require large investments, suggesting that a complementary mechanism is needed. That, too, should be its own post, which I’ll try to do as early as next week. Today, my main goal was to argue that all of the social rights of citizenship interact, so we need to keep them all in mind as we try to make progress. In particular, programs that support incomes could affect market processes in ways that undermine our other social goals.
Planned for next week: A Public Inheritance? (29 April 2025)
<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>
T.H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Marshall and Tom Bottomore, Citizenship and Social Class (Pluto, 1992), 8.
Most public transportation services ought to be free (have no user fees). User fees recover very little of the total cost of these services (something like 9% in Boston and New York) and fall most heavily on those least able to pay. One reason to make this and other community amenities free is to encourage everyone in the community to use them. A major problem in America today, which I discussed in the note on poverty abolition, is that whole classes of society have withdrawn from public spaces. This undermines the general social fabric.
Marshall, 33.
As a society, we tend to consider how income and wealth are allocated in society as the sole focus of “distributive justice”—distinct and separate from individualistic conceptions of justice that focus on the equality of civil and political rights. In the “distributive” zone, we talk about, and hopefully minimize, inequality, but in the individualistic zone, we (try to) insist on absolute equality. This set-up obscures the connection between these domains, and the fact that some sort of material equality is necessary for the idea of equal civil and political rights to be meaningful at all. This is exactly where social rights live.
For a recent review, see Jon C. Dubin, “ The Color of Social Security”, Stanford Law and Policy Review (35) 2024, 104. https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Dubin-Publication-Ready-1.pdf
Mostly, I’ll pick up this thread in the post-WWII era, starting with the failed effort to include a UBI element in the 1942 Beveridge Report in the UK. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/0af54ee0-c714-4646-92ef-252c7f009c9f. There is also a neoliberal version of basic income, initially proposed by Milton Friedman as a negative income tax (Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago, 1962), 192ff. Arguably, the EITC is the off-spring of his proposal. The basic idea of using the income tax system to deliver these sorts of benefits is still a mainstay of policy.
For example, I would argue that Friedman’s proposal (last note) was intended as a substitute for the full set of transfer programs. Here, I want to be clear that my concern is that—whatever the intention—the substitution will be the effect of a UBI policy.