Milton Friedman Quotes

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman

Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive.
Milton Friedman

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

Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.
Milton Friedman

Governments never learn. Only people learn.
Milton Friedman

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
Milton Friedman

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
Milton Friedman

I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.
Milton Friedman

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

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
Milton Friedman

Inflation is taxation without legislation.
Milton Friedman

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
Milton Friedman

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
Milton Friedman

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.
Milton Friedman

Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
Milton Friedman

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
Milton Friedman

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

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
Milton Friedman

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.
Milton Friedman

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Milton Friedman

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

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

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
Milton Friedman

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

The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
Milton Friedman

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

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

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.
Milton Friedman

There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Milton Friedman

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman

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

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
Milton Friedman