The Taxpayer

The definite article is doing the same work here as in The Poor and The Homeless, marking a constructed category rather than describing anyone. What is named is a reflector role at the level of industrial endo-idealism, and the endo-ideal being reflected is The Economy, an abstraction anthropomorphized so that it can be served. Reversed accounting is the mechanism worth attending to. A person occupying this role depends on the unpaid labour of lifegivers and caregivers and on the resources of their communities, and then accuses others of parasiting off them, which reverses the direction of the actual transfer. That is inverted debt operating at social scale, where the beneficiary comes to feel owed. Marsh's observation about where blame is directed follows. When people look for the source of the obvious flaws in systems of dissociation they are always pointed at those not behaving as The Taxpayer, and society seldom looks past the propaganda to the real leeches. The related names in the definition matter, since The Working Class and The Honest Hardworking Man perform the same function with different vocabulary, and all three sort a population into those who contribute and those who take. The categorization itself is the operation, since as soon as someone becomes The Poor, The Homeless, The Disabled or A Single Mom they belong to a separate group and are no longer entitled to wider group solidarity.

The deserving and undeserving poor distinction has a long history in social policy, traced by Michael Katz and others through the poor laws to contemporary welfare debate, and taxpayer rhetoric is well studied in political communication as a device for constructing a contributing public against a dependent one. Feminist economics has documented the exclusion of unpaid care from national accounting, which is the labour Marsh says the role depends on. Her contribution is to file it as a reflector position, which makes The Taxpayer someone serving an endo-ideal rather than someone defending an interest, and predicts loyalty to an arrangement that does not benefit them.