Whether or not one agrees with the decisions taken by our political leaders who sent them off to war, it’s undeniable that the veterans of the various post-9/11 wars are suffering. The nearly 3 million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who have returned to civilian life are afflicted with an official unemployment rate of about 9 percent — substantially higher than the overall rate of 5.6 percent. Another half million have the left the labor force entirely. Many struggle with poverty, foreclosure and homelessness brought on by an anemic and uneven recovery and compounded by the mental and physical scars of war.

The plight of veterans of recent wars who continue to fall through the social safety net offers a unique opportunity to reimagine the way government provides for the welfare of its citizens. Too often discussions concerning the provision of basic needs for Americans get tied up in questions of desert: The “undeserving” poor see their lifeline slashed to incentivize them to pull harder on their own bootstraps. But only the most callous among us would find it easy to disown the obligation we owe to those who have demonstrated willingness to put their bodies in the line of fire on our behalf. Veterans offer a chance to think clearly about how best we can help those in need — and if the primary problem we must solve is that far too many veterans lack an income to support themselves, why don’t we just provide it for them?

Around the world today there is a growing discourse about a guaranteed annual income, but the idea is hardly new. The concept of a basic income — whether as an unconditional payment or a guarantee that would top off whatever is earned to a level adequate to meet basic human needs — has enjoyed surprising support from both ends of the political spectrum. The free-market evangelists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman both endorsed it, as did Martin Luther King Jr. and liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith. In 1976, Hayek wrote, “There is no reason why in a free society government should not assure to all protection against severe deprivation in the form of an assured minimum income.”

In his final book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” King wrote that “the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” Galbraith argued in the mid-1960s that we can easily afford an income floor and pointed out that this was “not so much more than we will spend during the next fiscal year to restore freedom, democracy and religious liberty, as these are defined by the experts, in Vietnam.”