Milton Friedman Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Milton Friedman on Wise Famous Quotes.
'Deserves' is an impossible thing to decide. No one deserves anything. Thank God we don't get what we deserve.
Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.
People who intend only to serve public interest are led by invisible hand to private interest which was no part of their intention.
When something goes wrong, the natural tendency is to say, "By God, we need to pass a law and do something."
Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.
With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.
I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.
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?
Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.
I would say that in this world, the greatest source of inequality has been special privileges granted by government.
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.
Make the acvocacy of radical causes sufficiently remunerative, and the supply of advocates will be unlimited.
Complete free trade is not politically feasible. Why? Because it's only in the general interest and in no one's special interest.
A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.
You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.
The excuse for the destruction of liberty is always the plea of necessary ' that there is no alternative
Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves
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.
To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a monetary union, putting out a fiat currency, composed of independent states.
I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government.
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.
I believe that the monetary stability is an absolutely critical element in the satisfactory operation of a system.
The only reason free markets have a ghost of a chance is that they are so much more efficient than any other form of organization.
The invisible hand in politics operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market.
In response to a suggestion that total free trade would end in cheaper foreign products flooding the market and causing unemployment.
Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
There is no law of conservation which forces the growth of new centers of economic strength to be at the expense of existing centers.
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating.
The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power.
The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.
The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.
If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don't be surprised if you get unemployment.
Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition.
Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.