User:ImperfectlyInformed/basic income history

Roots in historical thought
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.

In 1795, American revolutionary Thomas Paine advocated a citizen's dividend 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).

Gaining ground with economists and policymakers, 1962-1987
In 1962, economist Milton Friedman advocated a minimum guaranteed income via a “negative income tax.”

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 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 Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) proposal.

The term basic income became the term of art due to work by the Basic Income Research Group (BIRG), which formed in 1987 out of a related group.

In 1986 the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Brookings Institution held a conference to discuss the results of four basic income experiments from 1968 to 1982.

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.

Empirical studies and increased awareness, 1988-Present
In his 1994 "autobiographical dialog," classical liberal Friedrich Hayek stated: "I have always said that I am in favor of a minimum income for every person in the country".