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 free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people. It gives them what they want, not what a particular group thinks they ought to want.
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
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.
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
The Great Depression was produced by a failure of government, not a failure of the private enterprise system.
You must separate out being pro-free enterprise from being pro-business.
The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.
A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want.
The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of its predictions with experience.
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.
Contemporaries of Milton Friedman
Other Economicss born within 50 years of Milton Friedman (1912–2006).