Top 300 Milton Friedman Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.”

— Milton Friedman

102. “I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government.”

— Milton Friedman

103. “Socialism, in the traditional sense, meant government ownership and operation of the means of production. Outside of North Korea and a couple of other spots, no one in the world today would define socialism that way. That will never come back.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

105. “The euro is going to be a big source of problems, not a source of help.”

— Milton Friedman

106. “The evidence of history speaks with a single voice. I do not know any exception to the proposition that if you compare like with like, the freer the system, the better off the ordinary poor people have been.”

— Milton Friedman

107. “We had much freer trade in the 19th century. We have much less globalization now than we did then.”

— Milton Friedman

108. “If China don’t free up the political side, its economic growth will come to an end – while it is still at a very low level.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

110. “We have a freer world because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the changes in China. Those two have been the main contributors to freedom in our time.”

— Milton Friedman

111. “There’s a smokestack on the back of every government program.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

113. “Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.”

— Milton Friedman

114. “What does it mean to say that government might have a responsibility? Government can’t have a responsibility any more than the business can. The only entities which can have responsibilities are people.”

— Milton Friedman

115. “So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

117. “The big problem for a democratic government – democrat with a small “d” – is how to hold down government spending.”

— Milton Friedman

118. “Sloppy writing reflects sloppy thinking.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

120. “It’s a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don’t approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.”

— Milton Friedman

121. “By encouraging men to spy and report on one another, by making it in the private interest of large numbers of citizens to evade the controls, and by making actions illegal that are in the public interest, the controls undermine individual morality.”

— Milton Friedman

122. “Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.”

— Milton Friedman

123. “The long-range sloution 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; we subsidize people not to go to work We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.”

— Milton Friedman

124. “The price works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time.”

— Milton Friedman

125. “Reality ensures that the end of history will never come.”

— Milton Friedman

126. “If freedom were not so economically efficient it certainly wouldn’t stand a chance.”

— Milton Friedman

127. “Undoubtedly Internet has reduced the possibilities of taxation. Why should I buy something here if I can buy it from a company in Japan or England or Brazil with a lower tax?”

— Milton Friedman

128. “Americans know very little about social statistics, but I am not sure that it’s important that Americans know about social statistics.”

— Milton Friedman

129. “Why is it that private insurance companies are not in trouble because people are getting older? Aren’t they subject to the same demographics? The difference is that they’ve accumulated a fund, not a pay-in, pay-out system.”

— Milton Friedman

130. “The broader and more influential organisations of businessmen have acted to undermine the basic foundation of the free market system they purport to represent and defend.”

— Milton Friedman

131. “Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That’s not a statement, it’s a definition.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

133. “The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can’t do that.”

— Milton Friedman

134. “The family, rather than the individual, has always been and remains today the basic building block of our society, though its hold has clearly been weakening – one of the most unfortunate consequences of the growth of government paternalism.”

— Milton Friedman

135. “So long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

— Milton Friedman

136. “Cutting government spending and government intrusion in the economy will almost surely involve immediate gain for the many, short-term pain for the few, and long-term gain for all.”

— Milton Friedman

137. “Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?”

— Milton Friedman

138. “Society doesn’t have values. People have values.”

— Milton Friedman

139. “When you have a time of crisis what happens depends on what ideas are floating around, and what ideas have been developed, and thought through, and are made effective.”

— Milton Friedman

140. “We economists don’t know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can’t sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you’ll have a tomato shortage. It’s the same with oil or gas.”

— Milton Friedman

141. “The Great Depression in the United States, far from being a sign of the inherent instability of the private enterprise system, is a testament to how much harm can be done by mistakes on the part of a few men when they wield vast power over the monetary system of the country.”

— Milton Friedman

142. “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

143. “Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”

— Milton Friedman

144. “What is not forbidden in Sweden, is obligatory.”

— Milton Friedman

145. “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.”

— Milton Friedman

146. “The central banks cannot control interest rates. That’s a mistake. They can control a particular rate, such as the Federal Funds rate, if they want to, but they can’t control interest rates.”

— Milton Friedman

147. “Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion – the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals – the technique of the marketplace.”

— Milton Friedman

148. “Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

150. “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