C.S. Friedman Quotes

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

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

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

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

The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.

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

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

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.

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

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

I even went so far as to become a Southern Baptist for a while, until I realized that they didn't hold 'em under long enough.

I was in Bangalore, India, the Silicon Valley of India, when I realized that the world was flat.

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

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.

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

Basically all the world's computer parts come from the same supply chain that runs from Korea, down through coastal China, over to Taiwan, and down to Malaysia.

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

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

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.

Money can buy you a fine dog, but only love can make him wag his tail.

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

You know there are very few Marxists left in the world... they're all in American universities.

OS X is sweet: it's simple and intuitive, and I think GNOME shares a lot of values with it.

I admit I was drinking a Guinness... but I did not swallow.

A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.

What every employer is looking for is not someone who can do the job, but someone who can reinvent the job.

And I think musicians can better run this state than politicians. And, hell, beauticians can better run the state than politicians.

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.

Inflation is taxation without legislation.

Musicians can run this state better than politicians. We won't get a lot done in the mornings, but we'll work late and be honest.

Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.

No, most of our political elite has not realized that the world is flat.

Well, I just said that Jesus and I were both Jewish and that neither of us ever had a job, we never had a home, we never married and we traveled around the countryside irritating people.

I have a daughter who is a sophomore in college and another who is in the 11th grade of high school.

Poly means more than one, and ticks are bloodsucking parasites.

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

I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before.

In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them.

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

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.

I just want Texas to be number one in something other than executions, toll roads and property taxes.

When a stray animal crosses your path, it may be as close to God as you're going to get in this lifetime.

The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention argues that no two countries that are both part of the same global supply chain will ever fight a war as long as they are each part of that supply chain.

There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.

Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.

Society doesn't have values. People have values.

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.

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.