Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was an American economist and recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize for economics. Friedman advocated limited government, deregulation, privatization, free trade and individual freedom around the globe. His ideas helped lead to thirty years of economic expansion — a time when more people were lifted from poverty than ever before in world history. Below are some quotes to instruct and inspire…
Click here to watch his original 1980 classic “Free to Choose” (As well as the 1990 update). Click here for another’s list of Friedman favorites.
Milton Friedman on the Phil Donahue Show discussing government, capitalism and freedom…
1979 Show… Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
1980 Show… Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
Friedman on which cabinet departments should stay and which should go.
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.
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.
Governments never learn. Only people learn.
Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
Inflation is taxation without legislation.
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.
Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.
If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven’t cut taxes enough.
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.
What kind of society isn’t structured on greed? 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.
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
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 most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
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.
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.
If the government is to try and ban private consumption of alcohol and tobacco, it must surely ban such activities as hang-gliding, skiing, rock-climbing and so on. Where should it stop? Rugby? American Football? Ice Hockey? Insofar as the government has information not generally available about the merits or demerits of the items we ingest or the activities we engage in, let it give us the information. But let it leave us free to choose what chances we want to take with our own lives.
The long-range solution 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.
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.
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.
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.
The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.
Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated — a system of checks and balances.
Keynesian economics doesn’t work, but nothing is harder for men than to face facts that threaten to undermine strongly held beliefs.
Keynes was wrong on just about everything, and his followers are wrong on absolutely everything.
Freedom is a rare and delicate flower.
[T]here is one and only one social 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, which is to say, engage in open and free competition without deception or fraud.
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. We all know a famous road that is paved with good intentions. The people who go around talking about their soft heart …, but unfortunately, it very often extends to their head as well, because the fact is that the programs that are labeled as being for the poor, for the needy, almost always have effects exactly the opposite of those which their well-intentioned sponsors intend them to have.
I challenge you to name a single social measure which has accomplished its intended objectives rather than the opposite, which has not done more harm than good[.]
If I want to do good with other people’s money I’d first have to take it away from them. That means that the welfare state philosophy of doing good with other people’s money, at its very bottom, is a philosophy of violence and coercion. It’s against freedom, because I have to use force to get the money.
I think it’s Big Brother who has to be looked after, and not the people.
[I]t is a natural human tendency to take for granted the good things that happen and to regard as the workings of the devil the bad things. And that if a bad thing comes along, you say, my God, we ought to pass a law and do something. That’s a very natural human tendency. I think the remarkable thing, the thing that needs to be explained, is not why we’ve had a movement towards collectivism and towards more government control, because that’s been the natural state of mankind for thousands of years. The remarkable thing in my opinion, from an intellectual point of view, is how you ever managed to get a century or a century and a half in which the dominant philosophy was the opposite. That’s the exception.
I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintenance of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing. And it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to try to do … something about them you not only may make them worse, but you will spread your tentacles and get bad results elsewhere.
[G]overnment 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.
[P]edagogical ability is a vice rather than a virtue if it is devoted to teaching error.” (quoting one of his professors)
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.
