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“It establishes a basic federal floor so that children in any state have at least the minimum essentials of life,” he said.

And Nixon wasn’t the only conservative in the 1960 touting some form of proto-“mincome.”

Economist Milton Friedman was a free market champion who once denounced minimum wage laws as the most “anti-black law in the land.” Nevertheless, he touted a “negative income tax” as way to “treat people who are poor the same way we treat people who are rich.”

George Shultz, an economist who would one day become President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, was a fan of the Nixon proposal. Robert Taft, a union-busting conservative U.S. Senator, had been advocating a “minimum standard of decent living” since the 1940s.

Up north in Canada, meanwhile, a guaranteed income had the backing of longtime Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield.

Had he beaten Pierre Trudeau in the 1968 election, Stanfield promised that a guaranteed annual income was the first plank in his party’s plan to ensure “decent life and equal opportunity for all Canadians.”

The conservative reasoning for “mincome” was simple; by cutting poor people a monthly cheque the federal government would suddenly be freed to dismantle the welfare state.

“It’s a proposal to help poor people by giving them money, which is what they need, rather than requiring them to come before a government official, detail all their assets and liabilities … and then be given a handout,” said Friedman at the time.