100+ Milton Friedman Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

source: - Milton Friedman, William Richard Allen (1983). “Bright promises, dismal performance: an economist's protest”, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.

Topics: Liberty, Essentials, Cooperation

If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.

Topics: Government, People, Liberty, Government Involvement

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.

Topics: People, Events, Done, Times Of Crisis, Persuading

Inflation is taxation without legislation.

Topics: Money, Taxation, Conservative

Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised.

Topics: People, Political, Liberty, Political Freedom

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.

Topics: Mean, Achievement, Political, Economic Freedom

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

Topics: Athlete, Ideas, Understanding, Knowledge And Understanding, Transmit

Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay

Topics: Pay, Fractions, Congress, Tax Day, Taxes Funny

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?

Topics: Marijuana, Government, Drug, Medical Marijuana, Cannabis

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

Topics: Philosophy, Government, People

Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.

Topics: Change, Real, Produce, Neoliberalism

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

Topics: Power, Liberty, Libertarian

If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don't be surprised if you get unemployment.

Topics: People, Unemployment, Pay

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.

Topics: Father, Government, People, Outlining

You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.

source: - "Milton Friedman, Immigration, and the Welfare State" by Kerry Howley, reason.com. June 10, 2008.

Topics: Immigration, Welfare, States, Welfare State

The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits.

Topics: Responsibility, Social, Profit, Social Responsibility, Corporate Social Responsibility

Why have we had such a decline in moral climate? I submit to you that a major factor has been a change in the philosophy which has been dominant, a change from belief in individual responsibility to belief in social responsibility. If you adopt the view that a man is not responsible for his own behavior, that somehow society is responsible, why should he seek to make his behavior good?

source: - Milton Friedman, William Richard Allen (1983). “Bright promises, dismal performance: an economist's protest”, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.

Topics: Philosophy, Responsibility, Men, Social Responsibility

The stock market and economy are two different things.

Topics: Two, Different, Economy, Two Different Things

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.

Topics: World, Individual, Inequality

The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.

source: - Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman (1990). “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement”, p.21, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Hands, Political, Democracy, Political Power

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

Topics: Opportunity, Men, Another Man, Opportunism, Statesmanship

A society that puts equality — in the sense of equality of outcome — ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.

source: - Free to Choose ch. 5 (1980).

Topics: Hands, People, Purpose

You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.

source: - Source: www.pbs.org

Topics: Eye, Poverty, Beholder, Eye Of The Beholder

Anything that government can do, private enterprise can do for half the cost.

Topics: Government, Cost, Half, Private Enterprise

When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.

Topics: Wind, People, Awful, Poor People

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

source: - "Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition".

Topics: Government, Civilization, Agriculture, Sustainable Agriculture, Centralized Government

You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.

Topics: Views, Opponents, Argument

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.

Topics: Agency, Order, Three, Acronyms

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.

Topics: Independence, Three, Firsts

The only reason there is a crisis about Social Security in the US and pensions in Europe and Japan is that you cannot maintain a "Ponzi" scheme indefinitely. We have collected from today's young to pay today's old and counted on tomorrow's young to keep doing so. That was a fine scheme as long as the number of young people was rising faster than old people. When that ratio comes to an end, such a system also has to end.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Japan, Europe, Numbers, Ponzi Scheme

I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or it they try, they will shortly be out of office.

Topics: Believe, Office, People, Either Or

If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.

source: - Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman (1999). “Two Lucky People: Memoirs”, p.75, University of Chicago Press

Topics: States, Propositions, Ifs

A free society releases the energies and abilities of people to pursue their own objectives. It prevents some people from arbitrarily suppressing others. It does not prevent some people from achieving positions of privilege, but so long as freedom is maintained, it prevents those positions of privilege from becoming institutionalized; they are subject to continued attack by other able, ambitious people.

Topics: Long, People, Ambitious

I would say that in this world, the greatest source of inequality has been special privileges granted by government.

Topics: Government, Special, World

Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.

source: - Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman (1985). “Tyranny of the status quo”

Topics: Technique, Politics, Voters

Society doesn't have values. People have values.

source: - "Created Equal". PBS "Free to Choose", episode 5, 1980.

Topics: People, Economics, Values

What makes it [economics] most fascinating is that its fundamental principles are so simple that they can be written on one page, that anyone can understand them, and yet very few do.

Topics: Simple, Principles, Fundamentals

The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

source: - Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman (1990). “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement”, p.31, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Party, Believe, Simple, Wealth Of Nations

Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.

Topics: Government, Market Efficiency, Regulation, Intrusion

Business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger....Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that's a different question. We have to have that tariff to protect us against competition from abroad. We have to have that special provision in the tax code. We have to have that subsidy.

source: - "Defaming Milton Friedman" by Johan Norberg, reason.com. October 2008.

Topics: Competition, Special, Different

Theories can be based on any assumptions, however bizarre.

Topics: Assumption, Bizarre, Theory

Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition.

Topics: Unemployment, Wages, Investing

The long-range sloution to high unemployment is to increase the incentive for ordinary people to save, invest, work, and employ others. We make it costly for employers to employ people; we subsidize people not to go to work We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

Topics: Long, People, Unemployment

Making prohibition work is like making water run uphill; it's against nature.

Topics: Running, Freedom, Water

One of the reasons that I am in favor of less government is because when you have more government, industrialists take it over.

Topics: Government, Favors, Reason

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.

source: - Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.95, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Teacher, Salary, Schedules, Underpaid, Seniority

A free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.

source: - Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.2, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Country, Men, Can Do

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 bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.

source: - "The Phil Donahue Show", www.youtube.com. 1979.

Topics: Running, Government, Self, Great Achievement, Automobile Industry

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.

Topics: Thinking, Law, Giving

The growing role that the government has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only the enormous waste of taxpayers money but also to a far poorer educational system.

Topics: Educational, Government, Roles, Financing

Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.

Topics: Converting

Never try to walk across a river just because it has an average depth of four feet.

Topics: Average, Rivers, Feet

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.

source: - Source: www.pbs.org

Topics: Understanding, Facts, Speak

Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promises a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.

Topics: Jobs, Impossible Things, Promise, Subsistence

What works for Sweden wouldn't work for France or Germany or Italy. In a small state, you can reach outside for many of your activities. In a homogeneous culture, they are willing to pay higher taxes in order to achieve commonly held goals. But "common goals" are much harder to come by in larger, more heterogeneous populations.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Order, Goal, Population, Homogeneous, Common Goal

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.

Topics: Oil, Law, Two, Retailers, Two Cents

One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.

Topics: Drug, Roles, Corruption

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.

Topics: Great Depression, Currency, Federal Reserve, Central Banks, Contracting

The future of private enterprise capitalism is also the future of a free society. There is no possibility of having a politically free society unless the major part of its economic resources are operated under a capitalistic private enterprise system.

source: - Milton Friedman (1978). “Tax limitation, inflation and the role of government”, Fisher Inst

Topics: Economic, Possibility, Resources, Economic Resources

Every person shall be free to do good ' at his own expense.

Topics: Expenses, Persons

All of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from unemployment. It has come from figuring out how to produce more goods with fewer workers, thereby releasing labor to be more productive in other areas. It has never come about through permanent unemployment, but temporary unemployment, in the process of shifting people from one area to another.

Topics: Couple, People, Progress

The excuse for the destruction of liberty is always the plea of necessary ' that there is no alternative

Topics: Liberty, Alternatives, Excuse

A society that puts equality - in the sense of equality of outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's less well off to become tomorrow's rich, and in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a richer and fuller life.

source: - Free to Choose ch. 5 (1980).

Topics: Mean, Opportunity, Hands, Disadvantaged

Plato assumes somehow that government is a way in which you put unselfish and ungreedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men. But government is an institution whereby the people who have the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men, get in a position of controlling them. Look at the record of government. Where are these philosopher kings that Plato supposedly was trying to develop?

Topics: Kings, Plato, Selfish

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.

source: - Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.2, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Exercise, Men, Hands, Power Government

A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.

Topics: Liberty, Principles, Coercion

The real tragedy of minimum wage laws is that they are supported by well-meaning groups who want to reduce poverty. But the people who are hurt most by higher minimums are the most poverty stricken.

Topics: Hurt, Real, Law

The benefits of a tariff are visible. Union workers can see they are "protected". The harm which a tariff does is invisible. It's spread widely. There are people that don't have jobs because of tariffs but they don't know it.

Topics: Jobs, People, Doe

To really understand something you've got to reduce it to its principles.

Topics: Principles

Doing good with other people's money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else's money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people's money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force - sending a policeman to take the money from somebody's pocket - is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state.

source: - Milton Friedman (1978). “Tax limitation, inflation and the role of government”, Fisher Inst

Topics: Philosophy, Two, People, Welfare State

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

source: - Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.3, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Power, Harm

The broader and more influential organisations of businessmen have acted to undermine the basic foundation of the free market system they purport to represent and defend.

source: - Milton Friedman (1984). “The suicidal impulse of the business community”

Topics: Foundation, Influential, Businessman

If you spend your own money on yourself, you care how much you spend and how well you spend it. If you spend your own money on someone else, you care how much you spend, but you don't care how well it is spent. If you spend someone else's money on yourself, you don't care how much you spend, but you do care how well it is spent. And finally, if you spend someone else's money on someone else, you don't care how much you spend, and you don't care how well it is spent. That is government.

Topics: Government, Care, Wells

Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery.

source: - Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.9, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Political, Typical, Misery, Free Society

There have been unions based on gold or silver, but not on fiat money - money tempted to inflate - put out by politically independent entities.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Independent, Gold, Unions

The central banks cannot control interest rates. That's a mistake. They can control a particular rate, such as the Federal Funds rate, if they want to, but they can't control interest rates.

Topics: Mistake, Want, Interest

Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else.

Topics: Believe, Government, Way

Cutting government spending and government intrusion in the economy will almost surely involve immediate gain for the many, short-term pain for the few, and long-term gain for all.

Topics: Pain, Cutting, Government, Government Spending

Central bankers always try to avoid their last big mistake. So every time there's the threat of a contraction in the economy, they'll over stimulate the economy, by printing too much money. The result will be a rising roller coaster of inflation, with each high and low being higher than the preceding one.

Topics: Mistake, Trying, Bankers, Contractions

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.

Topics: Freedom, Government, Opening Up, Free Market Capitalism, Market Economy

A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. And a society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed.

Topics: Liberty, Firsts, Kind

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather 'What can I and my compatriots do through government' to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom?

source: - Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.2, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Country, Responsibility, Men, Individual Responsibility

It is taken for granted that workers should receive their pay partly in kind, in the form of medical care provided by the employer. How come? Why single out medical care? Surely food is no less essential to life than medical care. Why is it not at least as logical for workers to be required to buy their food at the company store as to be required to buy their medical care at the company store?

Topics: Taken, Care, Pay, Medical Care

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

Topics: Block, Choices, Our Society, Education Spending

Self-interest is not myopic selfishness. It is whatever it is that interests the participants, whatever they value, whatever goals they pursue. The scientist seeking to advance the frontiers of his discipline, the missionary seeking to convert infidels to the true faith, the philanthropist seeking to bring comfort to the needy - all are pursuing their interests, as they see them, as they judge them by their own values.

source: - Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman (1990). “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Self, Discipline, Goal, Myopic, Infidel

Rapid increases in the quantity of money produce inflation. Sharp decreases produce depression.

source: - Milton Friedman (1994). “Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History”, p.277, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Increase, Produce, Rapids

You can travel from one end of the industrialized world to the other and almost the only people you will find engaging in backbreaking toil are people who are doing it for sport. To find people whose day's toil has not been lightened by mechanical invention, you must go to the non-capitalist world.

source: - Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman (1990). “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement”, p.166, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Sports, People, Toil

If freedom were not so economically efficient it certainly wouldn't stand a chance.

Topics: Chance, Efficient, Ifs

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