Welfare in a neoliberal age: the politics of redistributive market liberalism

In spring 1947, Milton Friedman made his first trip outside the US to speak at a gathering of free-market intellectuals in the Swiss resort of Mont Pèlerin.¹ Friedman took with him a paper on ‘Taxation, poverty and income distribution’, which he presented to the conference on Tuesday 8 April and which proposed that Western governments should attempt to tackle poverty through a Negative Income Tax (NIT) programme. Friedman pointed out that the growth of state intervention and trade unionism over the previous half-century had largely been driven by the ‘desire to eliminate poverty’ and economic insecurity. If the liberals gathered