Milton Friedman quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Milton Friedman

Top Milton Friedman Quotes

Browse top 48 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Milton Friedman.

Favorite Milton Friedman Quotes

1. "Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons" ~ Milton Friedman

2. "I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual's natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they're responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of." ~ Milton Friedman

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

4. "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." ~ Milton Friedman

5. "The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem." ~ Milton Friedman

6. "Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless." ~ Milton Friedman

7. "Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it." ~ Milton Friedman

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

9. "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." ~ Milton Friedman

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

11. "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." ~ Milton Friedman

12. "Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government." ~ Milton Friedman

13. "We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas." ~ Milton Friedman

14. "For example, the supporters of tariffs treat it as self-evident that the creation of jobs is a desirable end, in and of itself, regardless of what the persons employed do. That is clearly wrong. If all we want are jobs, we can create any number--for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs--jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume." ~ Milton Friedman

15. "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both." ~ Milton Friedman

16. "Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp." ~ Milton Friedman

17. "The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them." ~ Milton Friedman

18. "A thoroughgoing paternalist who holds it cannot be dissuaded by being shown that he is making a mistake in logic. He is our opponent on grounds of principle, not simply a well-meaning but misguided friend. Basically, he believes in dictatorship, benevolent and maybe majoritarian, but dictatorship none the less. Those of us who believe in freedom must believe also in the freedom of individuals to make their own mistakes. If a man knowingly prefers to live for today, to use his resources for current enjoyment, deliberately choosing a penurious old age, by what right do we prevent him from doing so? We may argue with him, seek to persuade him that he is wrong, but are we entitled to use coercion to prevent him from doing what he chooses to do? Is there not always the possibility that he is right and that we are wrong? Humility is the distinguishing virtue of the believer in freedom; arrogance, of the paternalist." ~ Milton Friedman

19. "There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud" ~ Milton Friedman

20. "One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results." ~ Milton Friedman

21. "The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another." ~ Milton Friedman

22. "Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government-- in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player." ~ Milton Friedman

23. "The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both" ~ Milton Friedman

24. "See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true." ~ Milton Friedman

25. "Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative -- the building blocks of success throughout our society." ~ Milton Friedman

26. "He moves fastest who moves alone." ~ Milton Friedman

27. "Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn't really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it, and doesn't just talk about it, he wants to have the right amount of pollution. We can't really afford to eliminate it - not without abandoning all the benefits of technology that we not only enjoy but on which we depend." ~ Milton Friedman

28. "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable." ~ Milton Friedman

29. "We do not influence the course of events by persuading people that we are right when we make what they regard as radical proposals. Rather, we exert influence by keeping options available when something has to be done at a time of crisis." ~ Milton Friedman

30. "Inflation is taxation without legislation." ~ Milton Friedman

31. "Governments never learn. Only people learn." ~ Milton Friedman

32. "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." ~ Milton Friedman

33. "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself." ~ Milton Friedman

34. "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." ~ Milton Friedman

35. "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." ~ Milton Friedman

36. "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." ~ Milton Friedman

37. "Society doesn't have values. People have values." ~ Milton Friedman

38. "I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater." ~ Milton Friedman

39. "Keynes was a great economist. In every discipline, progress comes from people who make hypotheses, most of which turn out to be wrong, but all of which ultimately point to the right answer. Now Keynes, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,set forth a hypothesis which was a beautiful one, and it really altered the shape of economics. But it turned out that it was a wrong hypothesis. That doesn't mean that he wasn't a great man!" ~ Milton Friedman

40. "With respect to teachers' salaries .... Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority." ~ Milton Friedman

41. "With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves." ~ Milton Friedman

42. "Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels. [Reply to the government bureaucrat of one Asian country who told him that, reason why there were workers with shovels instead of modern tractors and earth movers at a worksite of a new canal, was that: "You don't understand. This is a jobs program."]" ~ Milton Friedman

43. "There is still a tendency to regard any existing government intervention as desirable, to attribute all evils to the market, and to evaluate new proposals for government control in their ideal form, as they might work if run by able, disinterested men free from the pressure of special interest groups." ~ Milton Friedman

44. "Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting." ~ Milton Friedman

45. "Lo que importa no es la inflación per se, sino la inflación no anticipada" ~ Milton Friedman

46. "Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. … And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold." ~ Milton Friedman

47. "The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the text books long after I am gone." ~ Milton Friedman

48. "Silence was pleased." ~ Milton Friedman

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