I'm Mark Whitaker and I'm here in Anchorage, the main city in the US state of Alaska for the BBC World Service.

I'm at the corner of 4th Avenue and D Street and on the pavement next to me is a life-sized bronze statue of a running dog.

This is an almost sacred spot for most Alaskans as it's here on the first Saturday in March each year

that the fearsome I Tiedod dog sled race sets off.

Teams of huskies and their drivers known as mushers race for a thousand miles to the Port

of Nome on the Bering Sea coast. Here they call it the last

great race on earth and nothing could be more Alaskan. This huge state prides itself

on its wilderness, its unique wildlife and its frontier lifestyle.

So political sympathies up here, not surprisingly, tend to be right-wing and Republican.

What is surprising is that Alaska is increasingly being looked at around the world

as providing a model for a particularly radical social policy that's gaining popularity

on the political left.

It's a very unique system.

It's really the only one like it in the world.

I think people do forget how strange it is.

And it's when you leave Alaska and talk to people about it

and they say, oh, is that where you get the free money you

know and people are astonished.

We do kind of count on it because my entire life we've received this check so we know it's

coming.

What these Alaskans are talking about is their state's permanent fund's dividend, always

referred to as either the PFD or just the dividend.

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