Milton Friedman
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Milton Friedman (1912- ), is a U.S. economist. In 1976 he was awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
- "There's no such thing as a free lunch."
- "I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible."
- "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. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
- "Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation."
- "The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem."
- "We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork."
- "We don't have a desperate need to grow. We have a desperate desire to grow."
- "There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income." Fox News interview 2004
- "I am a limited-government libertarian."
- "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." -- "An Open Letter to [Drug Czar] Bill Bennett," The Wall Street Journal (September 7, 1989)
- "What is not forbidden in Sweden, is obligatory"
- On the country which gave him the Nobel Prize.
- "The business of business is business"
- "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." (Capitalism and Freedom)
- "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 only gain at the expense of another"
- "Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned."
- "The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits."
- "Governments never learn. Only people learn."
- "So long as large sums of money are involved - and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal - it is literally impossible to stop the traffic, or even to make a serious reduction in its scope."
- "What would the people who sold us goods do with the money? They'd get dollars. What would they do with the dollars? Eat them?!"
- In response to a suggestion that total free trade would end in cheaper foreign products flooding the market and causing unemployment.
- "One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programmes by their intentions rather than their results."
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On drugs
- "it is because it's prohibited. 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."
- "There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.
fr:Milton Friedman it:Milton Friedman no:Milton Friedman pl:Milton Friedman
