Milton Friedman Quotes

• 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

• 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 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

• One man’s opportunism is another man’s statesmanship.

  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

• Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

  Milton Friedman

• Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?

  Milton Friedman

• Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

  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

• History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.

  Milton Friedman

• Governments never learn. Only people learn.

  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

• Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

  Milton Friedman

• Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive.

  Milton Friedman

• And what does reward virtue? You think the communist commissar rewards virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think, excuse me, if you’ll pardon me, American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout?

  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

• We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

  Milton Friedman

  Topics in Society

• Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

  Milton Friedman

  Topics in Politics

• If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.

  Milton Friedman

  Topics in Politics

Milton Friedman (41)

Birth:	31st July, 1912
Death:	16th November, 2006
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Author, Economist, Statistician

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Today's Anniversary - 18th December

Births

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Deaths

• 1855 - Samuel Rogers
• 1999 - Robert Bresson
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• 1933 - Mary Parker Follett
• 1975 - Theodosius Dobzhansky