Milton Friedman Quotes

Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.

When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.

You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.

I am a libertarian with a small "l" and a Republican with a capital "R". And I am a Republican with a capital "R" on grounds of expediency, not on principle.

I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible. ... because I believe the big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending.

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.

Now that I'm 60, every morning I look in the mirror and say, "I don't know who you are, stranger, but I'm gonna shave you anyway".

I would say that in this world, the greatest source of inequality has been special privileges granted by government.

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.

There are severe limits to the good that the government can do for the economy, but there are almost no limits to the harm it can do.

The broader and more influential organisations of businessmen have acted to undermine the basic foundation of the free market system they purport to represent and defend.

When something goes wrong, the natural tendency is to say, "By God, we need to pass a law and do something."

A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.

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.

I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there's something wrong, pass a law and do something about it.

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

Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse - for both the addict and the rest of us.

If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven't cut taxes enough.

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.

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

Anything that government can do, private enterprise can do for half the cost.

If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.

[U]nemployment is ... a side effect of the cure for inflation.

Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.

You never have real changes unless you have a time of crisis.

Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay

The excuse for the destruction of liberty is always the plea of necessary ' that there is no alternative

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

Americans know very little about social statistics, but I am not sure that it's important that Americans know about social statistics.

In response to a suggestion that total free trade would end in cheaper foreign products flooding the market and causing unemployment.

Every person shall be free to do good ' at his own expense.

Economic freedom is ... an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.

Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.

To really understand something you've got to reduce it to its principles.

Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.

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

If you do not force political freedom, economic freedom will be stymied sooner or later.

There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.

What kind of society isn't structured on greed?

If freedom were not so economically efficient it certainly wouldn't stand a chance.

The facts never speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted in terms of some understanding of where they come from and what the relation between them is.

Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition.

Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. It is made by or stopped by the central bank.

My major problem with the world is a problem of scarcity in the midst of plenty ... of people starving while there are unused resources ... people having skills which are not being used.

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.

The stock market and economy are two different things.

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.

The Federal Reserve the privately owned U.S. central bank definitely caused The Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one third from 1929 to 1933.