The neoliberal thought that dominated our politics for decades — and now appears to be in retreat — is often summarized as a relentless push to expand the market, shrink the state, and impose strict conditions on social insurance. But as Jennifer Burns’ new biography of Milton Friedman demonstrates, the leading lights of the movement — and many of their teachers at the University of Chicago and elsewhere — were more complicated and interesting thinkers than this shorthand suggests. As we reimagine our economic order, we would do well to grapple with their thought, both for the substantive insights it provides on the relationship of market, state, and welfare and for lessons on what happens to intellectual concepts when they collide with political realities.
This inaugural forum of Hypertext dives into one overlooked aspect of Milton Friedman’s thought — his advocacy of an unconditional negative income tax (NIT) that would create an income floor no American could fall below.
- An excerpt from Burns’ biography illuminates Friedman’s idea and its short-term political failure.
- Matt Zwolinski argues that the thought of Friedrich Hayek — like Friedman, a market-oriented, postwar public intellectual of the first order — provides a deep philosophical basis for advocating a negative income tax, or the related concept of Universal Basic Income.
- Neil Gross, drawing on the work of Brian Steensland, writes that the NIT failed originally because Americans insisted on the distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor — but that we may be ready now to rethink the idea, and should not get hung up on its branding as “neoliberal.”
- Joshua T. McCabe argues that in fact, we have muddled our way to a welfare state consistent with Friedman’s broad vision, but messier in its execution. While the question of “deservingness” looms large, McCabe says the principal barrier to progress recently has been that NIT-style policies have long been framed as “tax relief.”
Please read these wonderful essays, share them widely, and let us know your thoughts.
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