Top 100 Quotes About Milton Friedman
#2. When the economy was going up, [Milton Friedman and I] both gave the same advice, and when the economy was going down, we gave the same advice. But in between he didn't change his advice at all.
Paul Samuelson
#3. If you put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand. - Milton Friedman
Vikram Mansharamani
#4. Inflation', wrote Milton Friedman in a famous definition, 'is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.
Niall Ferguson
#5. Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers.
Robert Solow
#6. All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.
George Stigler
#7. A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman's famous 'helicopter drop' of money.
Ben Bernanke
#8. Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#9. The myth of the inevitability of economic globalization is based largely on the work of Milton Friedman, and easily the most underreported story of our time is that the current economy proves Friedman flatly wrong.
Molly Ivins
#10. In terms of companies, they must stand for something bigger. They must be dedicated to something larger than financial results. I reject the Milton Friedman belief that a company's sole responsibility is to the shareholders.
Srikumar Rao
#11. I took the obligatory economics classes in school, but I've long been a fan of the Milton Friedman philosophy and its libertarian bent: One must be free to do what one wants to do, as long as you don't harm another. This is the seminal treatise on free-market economics.
Charlie Trotter
#12. Economists agree about economics - and that's a science - and they disagree about economic policy because that's a value judgment ... I've had profound disagreements on policy with the famous Milton Friedman. But, on economics, we agree.
Franco Modigliani
#13. With the passing of Milton Friedman on November 16, 2006, we lost one of the great champions of free markets.
Steve Hanke
#14. Minimum wage increases. The Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman has observed that the minimum wage is "one of the most ... anti-black laws on the statute books" because it destroys entry level jobs for second paycheck earners, teens, and other unskilled workers.
David Horowitz
#15. While no inference is intended here, it is worth noting, in connection with Milton Friedman's comment that "Kelso just turned Marx upside down," that it is not necessarily amiss to turn a fellow upside down if that in fact straightens out his thinking.
Louis O. Kelso
#16. Take Milton Friedman, he sits at his desk pontificating about such bunk as the monetary system being the answer to our problems. The monetary system is a legal contrivance. Property, not money, is real wealth. It's physical, not legal.
Louis O. Kelso
#17. You want to prove that Milton Friedman is a fascist? It's easy. Quote him.
Arthur Laffer
#18. When you grow up in the Soviet society under the communists you heard about the one man who is especially dangerous, especially crazy, and absolutely mad, and which would destroy all the human beings and the economies and so on, and this man was called Milton Friedman.
Mart Laar
#19. 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
#20. So long as large sums of money are involved - and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal - it is literally impossible to stop the traffic, or even to make a serious reduction in its scope.
Milton Friedman
#21. I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government.
Milton Friedman
#22. I think in some ways it would make more sense to have as a poverty level a relative concept and say, the level of poverty is that level of income or that level of consumption below which 10 percent of the people now are.
Milton Friedman
#23. 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
#24. The facts never speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted in terms of some understanding of where they come from and what the relation between them is.
Milton Friedman
#25. The preservation of liberty, not the promotion of efficiency, is the primary justification for private property. Efficiency is a happy, though not accidental, by-product - and a most important by-product because liberty could not have survived if it had not also produced affluence.
Milton Friedman
#27. [U]nemployment is ... a side effect of the cure for inflation.
Milton Friedman
#28. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a monetary union, putting out a fiat currency, composed of independent states.
Milton Friedman
#29. Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.
Milton Friedman
#30. 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
#31. The Internet moves us closer to "perfect information" on markets. Individuals and companies alike can buy and sell across borders and jurisdictions wherever they find the best match of supply and demand.
Milton Friedman
#32. 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
#34. 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
#35. The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits.
Milton Friedman
#36. Socialism, in the traditional sense, meant government ownership and operation of the means of production. Outside of North Korea and a couple of other spots, no one in the world today would define socialism that way. That will never come back.
Milton Friedman
#37. The case against a fully independent central bank is strong indeed.
Milton Friedman
#38. 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
#39. It all would have been much better if individuals saved for their own old age.
Milton Friedman
#40. Every person shall be free to do good ' at his own expense.
Milton Friedman
#41. 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
#42. Rapid increases in the quantity of money produce inflation. Sharp decreases produce depression.
Milton Friedman
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. In response to a suggestion that total free trade would end in cheaper foreign products flooding the market and causing unemployment.
Milton Friedman
#46. If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.
Milton Friedman
#47. You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.
Milton Friedman
#48. 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
#49. 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
#51. There seems little correlation between poverty and honesty. One would rather expect the opposite; dishonesty may not always pay but surely it sometimes does
Milton Friedman
#52. The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
Milton Friedman
#53. 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
#54. The major way that society has come to agree on the rules of property is through the growth of common law, though more recently legislation has played an increasing role.
Milton Friedman
#55. Money is a very powerful thing, which you hardly notice when it goes right, but which can create havoc when it goes wrong.
Milton Friedman
#56. Americans know very little about social statistics, but I am not sure that it's important that Americans know about social statistics.
Milton Friedman
#57. a private enterprise is a failure, it closes down - unless it can get a government subsidy to keep it going; if a government enterprise fails, it is expanded. I challenge you to find exceptions. The
Milton Friedman
#58. A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.
Milton Friedman
#59. 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
#61. Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
Milton Friedman
#62. There are severe limits to the good that the government can do for the economy, but there are almost no limits to the harm it can do.
Milton Friedman
#63. 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
#64. The evidence of history speaks with a single voice. I do not know any exception to the proposition that if you compare like with like, the freer the system, the better off the ordinary poor people have been.
Milton Friedman
#65. You know there are very few Marxists left in the world ... they're all in American universities.
Milton Friedman
#66. 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.
Milton Friedman
#68. George Stigler was a delightful correspondent. In a letter from London in 1948, after remarking on the inconvertibility of the pound and the inedible, still-rationed food, he concluded, So here I am losing weight and gaining pounds.
Milton Friedman
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government. And that's close to 40 percent of our national income.
Milton Friedman
#73. The excuse for the destruction of liberty is always the plea of necessary ' that there is no alternative
Milton Friedman
#75. The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum for determining the "rule of the game" and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on.
Milton Friedman
#76. Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.
Milton Friedman
#79. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's disadvantaged to become tomorrow's privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.
Milton Friedman
#80. By encouraging men to spy and report on one another, by making it in the private interest of large numbers of citizens to evade the controls, and by making actions illegal that are in the public interest, the controls undermine individual morality.
Milton Friedman
#82. 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
#83. When something goes wrong, the natural tendency is to say, "By God, we need to pass a law and do something."
Milton Friedman
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. There's no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn't exist.
Milton Friedman
#87. There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
Milton Friedman
#88. 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
#89. We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
Milton Friedman
#90. The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Milton Friedman
#91. Reality ensures that the end of history will never come.
Milton Friedman
#92. You never have real changes unless you have a time of crisis.
Milton Friedman
#93. Economists may not know how to run the economy, but they know how to create shortages or gluts simply by regulating prices below the market, or artificially supporting them from above.
Milton Friedman
#94. Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.
Milton Friedman
#95. The Internet is the most effective instrument we have for globalization.
Milton Friedman
#96. The state of our educational system is a disgrace to our country. We have an elementary and secondary school system in which close to half of the youngsters never graduate properly. It's a disgrace that there is more illiteracy today than there was 100 years ago.
Milton Friedman
#97. The invisible hand in politics operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market.
Milton Friedman
#98. The free market is not only a more efficient decision maker than even the wisest central planning body, but even more important, the free market keeps economic power widely dispersed.
Milton Friedman
#99. Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay
Milton Friedman
#100. What would the people who sold us goods do with the money? They'd get dollars. What would they do with the dollars? Eat them?!
Milton Friedman
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