Milton Friedman
Champion of free markets and monetary policy
Most quoted
"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."
— from Speech, 1979
"The long-range solution [to high unemployment] is to increase the incentive for ordinary people to save, invest, work, and employ others. We make it costly for employers to employ people, and we subsidize people not to go to work. We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork."
— from Book, 1980
"The government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government tries to do more than this, it creates problems."
— from Interview/Speech
All quotes by Milton Friedman (290)
The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
Freedom is a rare and delicate plant.
The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating.
The minimum wage law is most properly described as a law saying employers must discriminate against people who have low skills.
What kind of society isn't structured on greed? 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.
The real miracle of the market is that it tends to use greed to do good.
The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization... have never come from centralized government.
The tyranny of the status quo.
Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
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 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.
History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.
The Fed's only real power is the power to create money and thereby create inflation.
The student of society... must be on his guard against acquiring an unconscious bias. The first principle of science is objectivity.
Every friend of freedom... must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens.
The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the textbooks long after I am gone.
The rate of interest is the price of credit. It is to the market for loanable funds what the wage rate is to the labor market or the price of apples is to the apple market.
I think the government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem and very often makes the problem worse.
Contemporaries of Milton Friedman
Other Economicss born within 50 years of Milton Friedman (1912–2006).