Top 300 Milton Friedman Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “None of this means that government does not have a very real function. Indeed, the tragedy is that because government is doing so many things it ought not to be doing, it performs the functions it ought to be performing badly. The basic functions of government are to defend the nation against foreign enemies, to prevent coercion of some individuals by others within the country, to provide a means of deciding on our rules, and to adjudicate disputes.3.”

— Milton Friedman

202. “It is true that a competitive market is not the whole of society. A great deal depends on the qualities of the population and the nation in how they organize the non-market aspects of society.”

— Milton Friedman

203. “Political leaders in capitalist countries who cheer the collapse of socialism in other countries continue to favor socialist solutions in their own. They know the words, but they have not learned the tune.”

— Milton Friedman

204. “The case against a fully independent central bank is strong indeed.”

— Milton Friedman

205. “When you argue for free markets, you are arguing against the trend.”

— Milton Friedman

206. “There seems little correlation between poverty and honesty. One would rather expect the opposite; dishonesty may not always pay but surely it sometimes does.”

— Milton Friedman

207. “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.”

— Milton Friedman

208. “The preservation of liberty, not the promotion of efficiency, is the primary justification for private property. Efficiency is a happy, though not accidental, by-product – and a most important by-product because liberty could not have survived if it had not also produced affluence.”

— Milton Friedman

209. “The Great Depression in the United States was caused – I won’t say caused, was enormously intensified and made far worse than it would have been by bad monetary policy.”

— Milton Friedman

210. “Rapid increases in the quantity of money produce inflation. Sharp decreases produce depression.”

— Milton Friedman

211. “Social responsibility is a fundamentally subversive doctrine” in a free society, and have said that in such a society, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits 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

212. “Politicians will always spend every penny of tax raised and whatever else they can get away with.”

— Milton Friedman

213. “Now here’s somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he’s caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it’s absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That’s the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons.”

— Milton Friedman

214. “Economists may not know how to run the economy, but they know how to create shortages or gluts simply by regulating prices below the market, or artificially supporting them from above.”

— Milton Friedman

215. “Given greater freedom about where to send their children, parents of a kind would flock together and so prevent a healthy intermingling of children from decidedly different backgrounds.”

— Milton Friedman

216. “The big issue is whether the United States will succeed in its venture of reshaping the Middle East. It is not clear to me that using military force is the way to do it. We should not have gone into Iraq. But we have.”

— Milton Friedman

217. “China’s productive system draws upon the other East Asian countries to a great extent. The volume of trade is much larger than the net amount being exported from China. China needs substantial reserves to finance all that.”

— Milton Friedman

218. “There is no person, no theorist so reckless as he who says that the facts speak for themselves.”

— Milton Friedman

219. “How do you hold down government spending?”

— Milton Friedman

220. “I think there is universal agreement within the economics profession that the decline – the sharp decline in the quantity of money played a very major role in producing the Great Depression.”

— Milton Friedman

221. “Germany has a very able and productive workforce. It has high-quality products that are valued all over the world. It has every opportunity to be a productive, growing state. It just has to give its entrepreneurs a chance. It has to let them make money, hire and fire, and act like entrepreneurs.”

— Milton Friedman

222. “As a nation, we have been responsible for the murder of literally hundreds of thousands of people at home and abroad by fighting a war that should never have been started and can be won, if at all, only by converting the United States into a police state.”

— Milton Friedman

223. “Only people have incomes and they derive them through the market from the resources they own, whether these be in the form of corporate stock, or of bonds, or of land, or of their personal capacity.”

— Milton Friedman

224. “It all would have been much better if individuals saved for their own old age.”

— Milton Friedman

225. “Unfortunately, the hardest thing for people to understand is that maybe if you leave things alone, it’ll be better than stepping in and trying to do something.”

— Milton Friedman

226. “You mustn’t judge a politician by talk. You have to judge them by performance.”

— Milton Friedman

227. “Asking economists for investment advice is like asking a physicist to fix a broken toilet. Not their field, though sort of related.”

— Milton Friedman

228. “Government actions often provide substantial benefits to a few while imposing small costs on many.”

— Milton Friedman

229. “The countries that have risen and separated out as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union are, on the whole, following freer economic policies. Most of these states have freer government and less restrictions on trade.”

— Milton Friedman

230. “The argument for the free market is a complicated and sophisticated one and depends on demonstration of secondary effects. I have confidence market efficiency will win out.”

— Milton Friedman

231. “I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.”

— Milton Friedman

232. “Believers in aristocracy and socialism share a faith in centralized rule, in rule by command rather than by voluntary cooperation.”

— Milton Friedman

233. “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.”

— Milton Friedman

234. “The great tragedy of the drive to centralization, as of the drive to extend the scope of government in general, is that it is mostly led by men of goodwill who will be the first to rue its consequences.”

— Milton Friedman

235. “I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they’re responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of.”

— Milton Friedman

236. “There have been unions based on gold or silver, but not on fiat money – money tempted to inflate – put out by politically independent entities.”

— Milton Friedman

237. “One of the reasons that I am in favor of less government is because when you have more government, industrialists take it over.”

— Milton Friedman

238. “Another social problem is the high cost of housing and the destruction of housing. The North Bronx looks like the pictures recently coming from Yugoslavia of areas that have been shelled. There is no doubt what the cause is: rent control in the city of New York, both directly and via the government taking over many dwelling units because rent control prevented owners from keeping them up.”

— Milton Friedman

239. “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.”

— Milton Friedman

240. “Unfortunately, unanimity is not always feasible.”

— Milton Friedman

241. “There’s no way to avoid a burden on your freedom. The costs themselves are a burden on your freedom. The restrictions that are necessary in order to get rid of the terrorists are a burden to your freedom. So there’s no way in the short run to avoid a restriction on your freedom.”

— Milton Friedman

242. “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.”

— Milton Friedman

243. “So far as we know, no pollster has asked the public, “Are you getting your money’s worth for the more than 40 percent of your income being spent on your behalf by government?” But.”

— Milton Friedman

244. “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

245. “Government spends somebody else’s money on somebody else.”

— Milton Friedman

246. “A very different meaning of equality has emerged in the United States in recent decades – equality of outcome. Everyone should have the same level of living or of income, should finish the race at the same time. Equality of outcome is in clear conflict with liberty. The attempt to promote it has been a major source of bigger and bigger government, and of government-imposed restrictions on our liberty.”

— Milton Friedman

247. “If even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and drug rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to users could be dramatic.”

— Milton Friedman

248. “I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity.”

— Milton Friedman

249. “In all those cases, in accordance with the theme of this book, increases in economic freedom have gone hand in hand with increases in political and civil freedom and have led to increased prosperity; competitive capitalism and freedom have been inseparable.”

— Milton Friedman

250. “I know of no severe depression, in any country or any time, that was not accompanied by a sharp decline in the stock of money, and equally of no sharp decline in the stock of money that was not accompanied by a severe depression.”

— Milton Friedman