Milton Friedman Quotes (46 Quotes)

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.

One man's opportunism is another man's statesmanship.

Have all these countries found a genius like Greenspan ... What the foreign experience suggests is, you don't need a genius. You just need someone willing to make fighting inflation his top priority.

Minimum Wage. In Free to Choose, ... . . . the minimum wage law to be one of the most, if not the most anti-black law on the statute books.

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.

The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.

Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.

Inflation is taxation without legislation.

One thing you can say about Lew, he is persistent. And he's consistent as well as persistent. He has a well-based position which he's figured out, and he sticks to it.

The power to do good is also the power to do harm.

So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible And my answer to that is, no they do not.

Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals the technique of the marketplace.

Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

If, for example, existing government intervention is minor, we shall attach a smaller weight to the negative effect of additional government intervention. This is an important reason why many earlier liberals, like Henry Simons, writing at a time when government was small by today's standards, were willing to have government undertake activities that today's liberals would not accept now that government has become so overgrown.

When a man spends his own money to buy something for himself,he is very careful about how much he spends and how he spends it.When a man spends his own money to buy something for someone else,he is still very careful about how much he spends, but somewhatless what he spends it on. When a man spends someone else's moneyto buy something for himself, he is very careful about what hebuys, but doesn't care at all how much he spends. And when a manspends someone else's money on someone else, he doesn't care howmuch he spends or what he spends it on. And that's governmentfor you.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

Well first of all, tell me, is there some society you know of that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed?

Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive.

I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.

Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

I strongly urge the voters of Colorado to reject Referendum C, or any action that would suspend Colorado's Taxpayers Bill of Rights. I strongly favor the continued and uninterrupted use of TABOR, including it's so called ratchet mechanism. The ratchet is one of the best features of TABOR. It is the only thing that will reduce out-of-control government spending.

The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.

Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.

And what does reward virtue? You think the communist commissar rewards virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think, excuse me, if you'll pardon me, American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout?

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.

Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.

The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a, from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.

So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

... it is worth discussing radical changes, not in the expectation that they will be adopted promptly but for two other reasons. One is to construct an ideal goal, so that incremental changes can be judged by whether they move the institutional structure toward or away from that ideal. The other reason is very different. It is so that if a crisis requiring or facilitating radical change does arise, alternatives will be available that have been carefully developed and fully explored.