So a sense of earned entitlement is incredibly important for welfare legitimacy.
Given that freedom of movement exists across Europe, a rational debate about tough conditionality and earned entitlement is needed to avoid further myths arising.
Best of all, though, it would give pensioners an honoured category of their own, underlining the idea of the state pension as neither a privilege nor a handout, but an earned entitlement – and a pretty ungenerous one at that.
In fact, because social insurance commands wide popularity, countries that eschew "welfare rights" for systems of earned entitlement often end up redistributing far more to the poorest than we do.
It is an earned entitlement.
Many people, e.g., Jonathan Chait, are noting that when Paul Ryan, deeply offended by the inaugural speech, declared that No one is suggesting that what we call our earned entitlements — entitlements you pay for, like payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security — are putting you in a 'taker' category.
Meanwhile, in a speech last week in Thurrock, scene of a Ukip triumph in the recent elections, Ed Miliband pledged tougher measures including an end to the undercutting of wages, an insistence that employees in the public sector speak English and measures to ensure that immigrants "earn entitlements".
Regulations often helped the process by driving out hucksters and setting common continental-wide standards: the emergence of a social contract in which ordinary Americans earned entitlements to a decent income in old age reconciled them to an otherwise brutal process.
I felt that if found a way to do that, then I would somehow earn the entitlement to make my own record".
But state pensions, to which people earn an entitlement by paying national insurance, a payroll tax, are protected against inflation only for people who retire in Britain or to countries within the European Economic Area.
