Top 100 Milton Friedman Quotes
#1. The fall of the Berlin Wall did more for the progress of freedom than all of the books written by myself or Friedrich Hayek or others.
Milton Friedman
#2. If you really want to engage in policy activity, don't make that your vocation. Make it your avocation. Get a job. Get a secure base of income. Otherwise, you're going to get corrupted and destroyed.
Milton Friedman
#3. The Federal Reserve the privately owned U.S. central bank definitely caused The Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one third from 1929 to 1933.
Milton Friedman
#4. My major problem with the world is a problem of scarcity in the midst of plenty ... of people starving while there are unused resources ... people having skills which are not being used.
Milton Friedman
#5. 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
#6. The nineteenth-century liberal regarded an extension of freedom as the most effective way to promote welfare and equality; the twentieth-century liberal regards welfare and equality as either prerequisites of or alternatives to freedom.
Milton Friedman
#7. The Soviet experience was much worse than experts in the West had thought. That discovery had a tremendous impact both on the intellectual community and on the public at large.
Milton Friedman
#8. Rapid increases in the quantity of money produce inflation. Sharp decreases produce depression.
Milton Friedman
#9. The power to determine the quantity of money ... is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power.
Milton Friedman
#10. 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.
Milton Friedman
#11. If freedom led to wider inequality, I would prefer that to a world in which I got artificial equality at the expense of freedom. My objective, my god ... is freedom of individuals to pursue their own values.
Milton Friedman
#12. Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?
Milton Friedman
#14. 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
#15. Why is it that private insurance companies are not in trouble because people are getting older? Aren't they subject to the same demographics? The difference is that they've accumulated a fund, not a pay-in, pay-out system.
Milton Friedman
#16. There's no way to avoid a burden on your freedom. The costs themselves are a burden on your freedom. The restrictions that are necessary in order to get rid of the terrorists are a burden to your freedom. So there's no way in the short run to avoid a restriction on your freedom.
Milton Friedman
#17. There is one and only one responsibility of business: to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.
Milton Friedman
#18. The excuse for the destruction of liberty is always the plea of necessary ' that there is no alternative
Milton Friedman
#19. Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.
Milton Friedman
#20. I believe the role that people like myself have played in the transformation of public opinion has been by persistently presenting a different point of view, a point of view which stresses the importance of private markets, of individual freedom, and the distorting effect of governmental policy.
Milton Friedman
#21. The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next twenty-five or fifty 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
#22. There's no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn't exist.
Milton Friedman
#23. Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.
Milton Friedman
#24. The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Milton Friedman
#25. You never have real changes unless you have a time of crisis.
Milton Friedman
#26. The word 'free' is used three times in the Declaration of Independence and once in the First Amendment to the Constitution, along with 'freedom.' The word 'fair' is not used in either of our founding documents.
Milton Friedman
#27. The big issue is whether the United States will succeed in its venture of reshaping the Middle East. It is not clear to me that using military force is the way to do it. We should not have gone into Iraq. But we have.
Milton Friedman
#28. Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.
Milton Friedman
#29. If freedom were not so economically efficient it certainly wouldn't stand a chance.
Milton Friedman
#30. How did we make the transition from using wood to using coal, from using coal to using oil, from using oil to using natural gas? How in God's name did we make that transition without a Federal Energy Agency?
Milton Friedman
#31. Undoubtedly Internet has reduced the possibilities of taxation. Why should I buy something here if I can buy it from a company in Japan or England or Brazil with a lower tax?
Milton Friedman
#32. Given greater freedom about where to send their children, parents of a kind would flock together and so prevent a healthy intermingling of children from decidedly different backgrounds.
Milton Friedman
#33. Here, too, we tend to be schizophrenic. We would all like to see government spending go down, provided it is not spending that benefits us. We would all like to see deficits reduced, provided it is through taxes imposed on others.
Milton Friedman
#34. Politicians will always spend every penny of tax raised and whatever else they can get away with.
Milton Friedman
#35. [T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends.
Milton Friedman
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.
Milton Friedman
#39. No major institution in the US has so poor a record of performance over so long a period as the Federal Reserve, yet so high a public reputation.
Milton Friedman
#40. Government spends somebody else's money on somebody else.
Milton Friedman
#41. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. It is made by or stopped by the central bank.
Milton Friedman
#42. The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits
Milton Friedman
#43. If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.
Milton Friedman
#45. It is true that a competitive market is not the whole of society. A great deal depends on the qualities of the population and the nation in how they organize the non-market aspects of society.
Milton Friedman
#46. The Founding Fathers envisioned a federal government that trusts its people with their money and freedom, outlining this limited, non-intrusive federal government in ... the Constitution, leaving the other powers to people ... or to the states.
Milton Friedman
#47. One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.
Milton Friedman
#48. I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there's something wrong, pass a law and do something about it.
Milton Friedman
#49. 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.
Milton Friedman
#50. There is no law of conservation which forces the growth of new centers of economic strength to be at the expense of existing centers.
Milton Friedman
#51. In the US, the problem is primary and secondary education. We've had such an increase in inequality because a quarter of American kids don't finish high school!
Milton Friedman
#52. How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect? Freedom is a rare and delicate plan.
Milton Friedman
#53. On another level compulsion would change matters drastically: the kind of society that would emerge if such acts of redistribution were voluntary is altogether different - and, by our standards, infinitely preferable - to the kind that would emerge if redistribution were compulsory.
Milton Friedman
#54. The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power.
Milton Friedman
#55. I would say that in this world, the greatest source of inequality has been special privileges granted by government.
Milton Friedman
#56. How can thinking people believe that a government that cannot deliver the mail can deliver gas better than Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, and the rest?
Milton Friedman
#57. The collapse of communism in essence added tens and tens of millions of people to the world labor supply, and the people who were added had previously been getting very low income, but they were not unskilled. Many of them were fairly well educated.
Milton Friedman
#58. The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm.
Milton Friedman
#59. In a bureaucratic system, useless work drives out useful work.
Milton Friedman
#60. What does it mean to say that government might have a responsibility? Government can't have a responsibility any more than the business can. The only entities which can have responsibilities are people.
Milton Friedman
#61. A crackpot theory. Instead of saying labor's exploited, as Marx did, Kelso says capital's exploited. It's worse than Marx. It's Marx stood on its head.
Milton Friedman
#62. Children are responsible individuals in embryo. They have ultimate rights of their own and are not simply the playthings of their parents.
Milton Friedman
#63. When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union - like public housing in the United States - look decrepit within a year or two of their construction ...
Milton Friedman
#64. There is a real function for government in respect to pollution: to set conditions and, in particular, define property rights to make sure that the costs are borne by the parties responsible.
Milton Friedman
#65. There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.
Milton Friedman
#66. Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself ... Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.
Milton Friedman
#67. Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.
Milton Friedman
#68. When a private enterprise fails, it is closed down; when a government enterprise fails, it is expanded. Isn't that exactly what's been happening with drugs?
Milton Friedman
#69. I have long been a critic of Social Security, basically because I believe that it is not the business of government to tell people what fraction of their incomes they should devote to providing for their own or someone else's old age.
Milton Friedman
#70. Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist.
Milton Friedman
#71. Theories should be judged by their ability to predict events rather than by the realism of their assumptions.
Milton Friedman
#72. I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.
Milton Friedman
#73. There is no person, no theorist so reckless as he who says that the facts speak for themselves.
Milton Friedman
#74. Rich people are the experimental ground for every new development. The nature of progress is that what begins as a luxury for the rich becomes a necessity for the poor as it's developed and passed on.
Milton Friedman
#75. Now that I'm 60, every morning I look in the mirror and say, "I don't know who you are, stranger, but I'm gonna shave you anyway".
Milton Friedman
#76. Hong Kong is the bellwether. If the Chinese stick to their agreement to let Hong Kong go its own path, then China will also go that way. If they don't, that is a very bad sign. I'm optimistic.
Milton Friedman
#77. The government doesn't have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.
Milton Friedman
#79. If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
Milton Friedman
#81. On aging societies, there is no reason why a country that has a lot of old people can't be prosperous if, during their working lives, individuals provide for their retirement.
Milton Friedman
#82. The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power - we must have a dispersion of power.
Milton Friedman
#83. If China don't free up the political side, its economic growth will come to an end - while it is still at a very low level.
Milton Friedman
#84. Complete free trade is not politically feasible. Why? Because it's only in the general interest and in no one's special interest.
Milton Friedman
#85. One of the reasons that I am in favor of less government is because when you have more government, industrialists take it over.
Milton Friedman
#86. Never try to walk across a river just because it has an average depth of four feet.
Milton Friedman
#87. One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
Milton Friedman
#88. Everywhere, and at all times, economic progress has meant far more to the poor than to the rich.
Milton Friedman
#89. The fall of the Berlin Wall really demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was a bad system, and what subsequently happened in the Soviet Union, that that system was a failure.
Milton Friedman
#90. I know of no severe depression, in any country or any time, that was not accompanied by a sharp decline in the stock of money, and equally of no sharp decline in the stock of money that was not accompanied by a severe depression.
Milton Friedman
#91. The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
Milton Friedman
#92. If even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and drug rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to users could be dramatic.
Milton Friedman
#94. 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
#95. I am convinced that the minimum-wage law is the most anti-Negro law on our statute books in its effect, not its intent.
Milton Friedman
#96. And where are you going to get these angels who are going to run society for us?
Milton Friedman
#97. 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
#98. World trade depends on differences among countries, not similarities. Different countries are in different stages of development. It is appropriate for them to have different patterns, different policies for ecology, labor standards, and so forth.
Milton Friedman
#99. John Lott documents how far 'politically correct' vested interests are willing to go to denigrate anyone who dares disagree with them. Lott has done us all a service by his thorough, thoughtful scholarly approach to a highly controversial issue.
Milton Friedman
#100. Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive.
Milton Friedman
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