The Personal Website of Mark W. Dawson

My Favorite Quotes of Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.

“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”
- Milton Friedman

“Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.”
- Milton Friedman

“Governments never learn. Only people learn.”
- Milton Friedman

“Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.”
- Milton Friedman

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

“I think the government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem and very often makes the problem worse.”
- Milton Friedman

“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. “
- Milton Friedman

“If all we want are jobs, we can create any number—for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs—jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume.”
- Milton Friedman

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
- Milton Friedman

“Inflation is taxation without legislation.”
- Milton Friedman

“Is there some society you know 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? Of course, none of us are greedy, it’s only the other fellow who’s greedy.”
- Milton Friedman

“Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”
- Milton Friedman

“Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.”
- Milton Friedman

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”
- Milton Friedman

“Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.”
- Milton Friedman

“Society doesn't have values. People have values.”
- Milton Friedman

“The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way.

“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.”
- Milton Friedman

“The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”
- Milton Friedman

“The lack of balance in governmental activity reflects primarily the failure to separate sharply the question what activities it is appropriate for government to finance from the question what activities it is appropriate for government to administer—a distinction that is important in other areas of government activity as well.”
- Milton Friedman

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

“There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
- Milton Friedman

“There is one and only one social 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, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud. “
- Milton Friedman

“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”
- Milton Friedman

“When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union—like public housing in the United States—look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.”
- Milton Friedman