Guaranteed Minimum Income - Advocates

Advocates

The first Muslim Caliph Abu Bakr introduced a guaranteed minimum standard of income, granting each man, woman, and child ten dirhams annually; this was later increased to twenty dirhams.

American revolutionary Thomas Paine advocated a basic income guarantee to all US citizens as compensation for "loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property" (Agrarian Justice, 1795).

French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte echoed Paine's sentiments and commented that 'man is entitled by birthright to a share of the Earth's produce sufficient to fill the needs of his existence' (Herold, 1955).

In 1962, economist Milton Friedman proposed a Negative Income Tax coupled with a flat tax in support of a guaranteed minimum income.

In 1963, Robert Theobald published the book Free Men and Free Markets, in which he advocated a guaranteed minimum income (the origin of the modern version of the phrase).

In 1966 the Cloward–Piven strategy advocated "overloading" the US welfare system to force its collapse in the hopes that it would be replaced by "a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty".

In his final book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967) Martin Luther King Jr. wrote

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income. —from the chapter titled "Where We Are Going"

In 1968, James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith and another 1,200 economists signed a document calling for the US Congress to introduce in that year a system of income guarantees and supplements.

In 1973, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote The Politics of a Guaranteed Income in which he advocated the Guaranteed Minimum Income and discussed Richard Nixon's GAI proposal.

In 1987, New Zealand's Labour Finance Minister Roger Douglas announced a Guaranteed Minimum Family Income Scheme to accompany a new flat tax. Both were quashed by then Prime Minister David Lange, who sacked Douglas.

In his 1994 "autobiographical dialog" Friedrich Hayek stated "I have always said that I am in favor of a minimum income for every person in the country."

Modern advocates include Hans-Werner Sinn (Germany) and Ayşe Buğra (Turkey), The Green Economics Institute (GEI) www.greeneconomics.org