Milton 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

The government doesn't have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.

The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power - we must have a dispersion of power.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

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.

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

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

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

With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.

There's no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn't exist.

So long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

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