Milton Friedman, who died in 2006 at the age of 94, was for decades considered, a leading US economist, who garnered worldwide renown. Winner of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his many achievements, Friedman criticized traditional Keynesian economics as “naïve” and reinterpreted many of the economic theories broadly accepted up to his era. He was an outspoken free market capitalist who acted as an honored adviser to emblematically ultra-conservative world leaders such as US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and his theories on such key areas as monetary policy, privatization and deregulation exercised a major influence on the governing policies of many Western governments and multilateral organizations in the 1980s and ‘90s.

Such a staunch conservative would seem like an unlikely academic to go to in search of backing for the controversial idea of giving spending money away to every person and family, no strings attached. But the fact is that one could hardly have asked for a more vocal and enthusiastic supporter of universal basic income (UBI) than Professor Friedman. Indeed, guaranteed income was the topic of one of the essays collected in his 1962 book entitledin which he laid out his stance on a variety of public policy principles.

Friedman wrote about UBI as a kind of “negative income tax”, but also envisaged it, frankly and realistically, as what it would be: namely, free money. He based his support on five fundamental tenets:

First and foremost, Friedman suggested that a single universal welfare program would massively and effectively cut government red tape, and, therefore, government spending. That is to say, Friedman’s theory was that it would be dramatically cheaper for governments to simply give money away to their citizens than to engage in complicated social welfare programs based on establishing need before providing benefits and then having to supervise the spending of that aid and to effect due diligence to decide whether benefits should continue or be suspended depending on the changing circumstances of the beneficiaries.

Specifically regarding his own country, Friedman’s advice was to replace the morass of over 125 social welfare programs with a single free-money distribution scheme, which would be vastly cheaper to maintain and much more efficient in covering the population’s basic needs. In his own words, “We should replace the ragbag of specific welfare programs with a single comprehensive program of income supplements in cash

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a negative income tax. It would provide an assured minimum to all persons in need, regardless of the reasons for their need

.” He added that, “

A negative income tax provides comprehensive reform which would do more efficiently and humanely what our present welfare system does so inefficiently and inhumanely.