In the 1960s even Milton Friedman endorsed basic income redistribution

Evidence

When it was first proposed, Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan attracted an extraordinarily broad alliance of supporters—embracing the Republican president and moderate conservative Richard Nixon, the neoliberal Milton Friedman, the Democrat Moynihan, the liberals and leftists of the National Welfare Rights Movement, and liberal economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith and James Tobin. There were of course clear differences of opinion among those who supported the plan—Friedman, for example, envisaged a more frugal form of welfare redistribution than that favored by liberals or leftists (in private correspondence, he conceded that he saw the negative income tax as a pragmatic step towards the elimination of all social welfare programs). But with the exception of a few dissident, feminist voices in the National Welfare Rights Movement, all agreed that welfare in its existing form undermined the traditional family. And all converged on the necessity of maintaining some kind of redistributive welfare system. In the 1960s, even Friedman recognized the need for a basic income redistribution program to ameliorate the inevitable market failures of private charity. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 230

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Directly complicates the crude picture of Friedman/neoliberalism as wholly anti-welfare; connects to the book’s stated purpose of fracturing the caricature.
• QUESTION: What shifted Friedman from this 1960s position to the later Reagan-era stance? Worth tracking the doctrine’s own trajectory.

Related

• A Nixon welfare plan briefly united figures across the political spectrum (similarity 0.89)
• Friedman’s negative income tax aimed to gut welfare bureaucracies, not eliminate redistribution (similarity 0.81)
• Friedman helped create the withholding tax he later condemned (similarity 0.80)
• Nixon’s 1969 FAP aimed to extend welfare to African American men (similarity 0.79)
• Free market advocates originally endorsed attacking income inequality at its source (similarity 0.78)