Milton Friedman Quotes

Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?

The real tragedy of minimum wage laws is that they are supported by well-meaning groups who want to reduce poverty. But the people who are hurt most by higher minimums are the most poverty stricken.

How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect? Freedom is a rare and delicate plant.

Is there some society you know of that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed?

The central banks cannot control interest rates. That's a mistake. They can control a particular rate, such as the Federal Funds rate, if they want to, but they can't control interest rates.

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.

Humility is the distinguishing virtue of the believer in freedom; arrogance, of the paternalist.

So long as large sums of money are involved - and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal - it is literally impossible to stop the traffic, or even to make a serious reduction in its scope.

It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.

Money is a very powerful thing, which you hardly notice when it goes right, but which can create havoc when it goes wrong.

The growing role that the government has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only the enormous waste of taxpayers money but also to a far poorer educational system.

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.

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

Not all schooling is education nor all education, schooling.

Theories can be based on any assumptions, however bizarre.

Statistics do not speak for themselves.

The Great Depression in the United States was caused - I won't say caused, was enormously intensified and made far worse than it would have been by bad monetary policy.

There have been unions based on gold or silver, but not on fiat money - money tempted to inflate - put out by politically independent entities.

The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.

And where are you going to get these angels who are going to run society for us?

When you argue for free markets, you are arguing against the trend.

A real gold standard is thoroughly consistent with [classical] liberal principles and I, for one, am entirely in favor of measures promoting its development.

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.

The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights.

The argument for the free market is a complicated and sophisticated one and depends on demonstration of secondary effects. I have confidence market efficiency will win out.

He moves fastest who moves alone.

What is not forbidden in Sweden, is obligatory.

I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.

Rapid increases in the quantity of money produce inflation. Sharp decreases produce depression.

It all would have been much better if individuals saved for their own old age.

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?

The Internet is the most effective instrument we have for globalization.

One of the reasons that I am in favor of less government is because when you have more government, industrialists take it over.

Complete free trade is not politically feasible. Why? Because it's only in the general interest and in no one's special interest.

Adam Smith's key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange can take place unless both parties do benefit.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.

The big problem for a democratic government - democrat with a small "d" - is how to hold down government spending.

The fall of the Berlin Wall really demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was a bad system, and what subsequently happened in the Soviet Union, that that system was a failure.

There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.

There is not a line in 'The Wealth of Nations' that is not still applicable to this day.

Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgment...In short, positive economics is or can be an "objective" science.

There is no person, no theorist so reckless as he who says that the facts speak for themselves.

There is only one social responsibility of business

The case against a fully independent central bank is strong indeed.

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 think there is universal agreement within the economics profession that the decline - the sharp decline in the quantity of money played a very major role in producing the Great Depression.

When you have a time of crisis what happens depends on what ideas are floating around, and what ideas have been developed, and thought through, and are made effective.

We had much freer trade in the 19th century. We have much less globalization now than we did then.

If you continue to use monetary policy to attempt to promote full employment the result would be that you would have higher inflation, and that you would not have lower unemployment.

Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else.