1. I would be curious to know how many contemporary Republicans would endorse this proposal for a social safety net (at the end I'll reveal who said it, and I suspect you'll be surprised).

2. "There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has,...a given minimum of sustenance for all...should not be guaranteed to all...; that is: some minimum of food, shelter, & clothing, sufficient to preserve health."

3. "Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision."

4. The author is Friedrich Hayek, and the book is Road to Serfdom (1944)--one of the ur-texts of modern conservatism.

5. Granted, these proposals are not that well fleshed out because Hayek cares more about arguing AGAINST the role of the state in economic affairs, claiming any little toe placed on that incline will lead us tumbling down the slippery slope to the gulag.

6. Despite these dire warnings about the inevitably apocalyptic effect of centralized planning, he had no problem with laws "limiting working hours, requiring sanitary arrangements, and providing an extensive system of social services."

7. He also thought the free market was not able to deal effectively with problems like "deforestation or the smoke of factories," and thus the government had an important role to play.

8. This is Friedrich F*ing Hayek, the patron saint of modern American Conservatism to whom one only genuflects, yet if you just focus on these parts of his arguments he sounds like someone who would have been booed off the stage at the last decade's worth of CPAC conferences.

9. Hayek was regarded as pretty "out there" when his book came out in 1944, someone espousing extreme anti-statism and overly dogmatic laissez-faire. It took decades of work to make his ideas seem "common sensical" to most American voters.

10. Put Hayek in all of his complexity and fullness on Twitter today (i.e., in the form of the quotes I opened with) and he'd be considered a RINO, an advocate for the nanny state and "job killing" environmental and labor regulations.

11. It's an indicator of just how far off the ideological map the current @gop has gone. It's as if generations of conservatives have read the General Motors cartoon version of Road to Serfdom, and skipped the actual text itself. https://fee.org/articles/the-essence-of-the-road-to-serfdom-in-cartoons/

12. Now what sort of 2018 conservative would choose to read a comic book version of Hayek over the actual book itself? Hmmm....