Top 400 Quotes & Sayings by Milton Friedman - Page 2

Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promises a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.

You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.

If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.

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.

The only reason there is a crisis about Social Security in the US and pensions in Europe and Japan is that you cannot maintain a "Ponzi" scheme indefinitely. We have collected from today's young to pay today's old and counted on tomorrow's young to keep doing so. That was a fine scheme as long as the number of young people was rising faster than old people. When that ratio comes to an end, such a system also has to end.

The stock market and economy are two different things.

A society that puts equality - in the sense of equality of outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's less well off to become tomorrow's rich, and in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a richer and fuller life.

The word 'free' is used three times in the Declaration of Independence and once in the First Amendment to the Constitution, along with 'freedom.' The word 'fair' is not used in either of our founding documents.

Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.

The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.

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.

Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else.

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

Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.

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.

Society doesn't have values. People have values.

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

There's no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn't exist.

The growing role that the government has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only the enormous waste of taxpayers money but also to a far poorer educational system.

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

Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.

A free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.

What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. 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.

What makes it [economics] most fascinating is that its fundamental principles are so simple that they can be written on one page, that anyone can understand them, and yet very few do.

Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.

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

With respect to teachers' salaries .... Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority.

With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.

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.

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

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.

Never try to walk across a river just because it has an average depth of four feet.

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.

There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.

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.

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

Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.

One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.

The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

In the 1960s, The National Education Association changed its character. The NEA changed into a union. And from that point on you can see deterioration in the quality of schooling in the United States.

Theories can be based on any assumptions, however bizarre.

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

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.

When a private enterprise fails, it is closed down; when a government enterprise fails, it is expanded. Isn't that exactly what's been happening with drugs?

The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power - we must have a dispersion of power.

Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.

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. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

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.

Plato assumes somehow that government is a way in which you put unselfish and ungreedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men. But government is an institution whereby the people who have the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men, get in a position of controlling them. Look at the record of government. Where are these philosopher kings that Plato supposedly was trying to develop?

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.

The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. 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.

See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.

The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in "On Liberty." The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good.

The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them.

He moves fastest who moves alone.

Saying it is one thing. Doing it is very different.

...theories should be judged by their ability to predict events rather than by the realism of their assumptions.

What works for Sweden wouldn't work for France or Germany or Italy. In a small state, you can reach outside for many of your activities. In a homogeneous culture, they are willing to pay higher taxes in order to achieve commonly held goals. But "common goals" are much harder to come by in larger, more heterogeneous populations.

So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free-enterprise system.

The strongest argument for free enterprise is that it prevents anybody from having too much power. Whether that person is a government official, a trade union official, or a business executive. If forces them to put up or shut up. They either have to deliver the goods, produce something that people are willing to pay for, are willing to buy, or else they have to go into a different business.