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Quotes by Milton Friedman

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
– 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
History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
– 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'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
Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
– 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
Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
– Milton Friedman
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.
– Milton Friedman
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
– Milton Friedman
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 most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
– Milton Friedman
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.
– Milton Friedman
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.
– Milton Friedman
The power to do good is also the power to do harm.
– Milton Friedman
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.
– Milton Friedman
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
– Milton Friedman
We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
– Milton Friedman
A society that puts equality... ahead of freedom will end up with neither.
– Milton Friedman
Well first of all, tell me, is there some society you know of 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?
– Milton Friedman
Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.
– Milton Friedman
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, from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.
– Milton Friedman
The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
– Milton Friedman
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
– Milton Friedman
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.
– Milton Friedman
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
– Milton Friedman
Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
– 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
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 on slight evidence.
– Milton Friedman