QUOTES by Milton Friedman
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they’re responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
When something goes wrong, the natural tendency is to say, "By God, we need to pass a law and do something."
Quote by -Milton Friedman
Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?
Quote by -Milton Friedman
So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
The rule of law does not guarantee freedom, since general law as well as personal edicts can be tyrannical. But increasing reliance on the rule of law clearly played a major role in transforming Western society from a world in which the ordinary citizen was literally subject to the arbitrary will of his master to a world in which the ordinary citizen could regard himself as his own master
Quote by -Milton Friedman
I am convinced that the minimum-wage law is the most anti-Negro law on our statute books in its effect, not its intent.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
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.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of drug-related crimes, but also on the belief that relieving our police and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drugs will enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to combatting other forms of crime. We would thus strike a double blow: reduce crime activity directly, and at the same time increase the efficacy of law enforcement and crime prevention.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
Economic freedom is ... an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated — a system of checks and balances.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
I start ... from a belief in individual freedom and that derives fundamentally from a belief in the limitations of our knowledge, from a belief ... that nobody can be sure that what he believes is right, is really right ... I'm an imperfect human being who cannot be certain of anything, so what position ... involved the least intolerance on my part? ... The most attractive position ... is putting individual freedom first.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
Making prohibition work is like making water run uphill; it's against nature.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
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.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
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?
Quote by -Milton Friedman
I have long been a critic of Social Security, basically because I believe that it is not the business of government to tell people what fraction of their incomes they should devote to providing for their own or someone else's old age.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
I believe that the monetary stability is an absolutely critical element in the satisfactory operation of a system.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
We measure poverty by what I believe is a very, very crude concept. We actually measure poverty by trying to get some kind of an estimate of the minimum expenditures on food that are required to maintain health, multiplying that number by three, and saying that's the level of poverty. And it's a very crude, inaccurate arrangement.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
I start ... from a belief in individual freedom and that derives fundamentally from a belief in the limitations of our knowledge, from a belief ... that nobody can be sure that what he believes is right, is really right ... I'm an imperfect human being who cannot be certain of anything, so what position ... involved the least intolerance on my part? ... The most attractive position ... is putting individual freedom first.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible. The reason I am is because I believe the big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending. The question is, 'How do you hold down government spending? The only effective way I think to hold it down, is to hold down the amount of income the government has. The way to do that is to cut taxes
Quote by -Milton Friedman
I believe the role that people like myself have played in the transformation of public opinion has been by persistently presenting a different point of view, a point of view which stresses the importance of private markets, of individual freedom, and the distorting effect of governmental policy.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or it they try, they will shortly be out of office.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself ... Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
If China don't free up the political side, its economic growth will come to an end - while it is still at a very low level.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
If you do not force political freedom, economic freedom will be stymied sooner or later.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
Viewed as a means to the end of political freedom, economic arrangements are important because of their effect on the concentration or dispersion of power. The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other
Quote by -Milton Friedman
If you really want to engage in policy activity, don't make that your vocation. Make it your avocation. Get a job. Get a secure base of income. Otherwise, you're going to get corrupted and destroyed.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity.
Quote by -Milton Friedman
I cannot disagree with you that having something like 500 economists is extremely unhealthy. As you say, it is not conducive to independent, objective research. You and I know there has been censorship of the material published. Equally important, the location of the economists in the Federal Reserve has had a significant influence on the kind of research they do, biasing that research toward noncontroversial technical papers on method as opposed to substantive papers on policy and results
Quote by -Milton Friedman
Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?
Quote by -Milton Friedman
History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
Quote by -Milton Friedman