Top 300 Milton Friedman Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “If you continue to use monetary policy to attempt to promote full employment the result would be that you would have higher inflation, and that you would not have lower unemployment.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

205. “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

206. “The key insight of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: 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 gain only at the expense of another.”

— Milton Friedman

207. “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

208. “In response to a suggestion that total free trade would end in cheaper foreign products flooding the market and causing unemployment.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

210. “The most harm of all is done when power is in the hands of people who are absolutely persuaded of the purity of their instincts – and the purity of their intentions.”

— Milton Friedman

211. “The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm.”

— Milton Friedman

212. “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

213. “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

214. “If you really want to engage in policy activity, don’t make that your vocation. Make it your avocation. Get a job. Get a secure base of income. Otherwise, you’re going to get corrupted and destroyed.”

— Milton Friedman

215. “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

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216. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

218. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

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220. “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

221. “Rich people are the experimental ground for every new development. The nature of progress is that what begins as a luxury for the rich becomes a necessity for the poor as it’s developed and passed on.”

— Milton Friedman

222. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “Germany’s problem, in part, is that it went into the euro at the wrong exchange rate that overvalued the deutsche mark.”

— Milton Friedman

228. “Japan has introduced fiscal stimulus five times in the past seven or eight years and each time it’s been a failure and that’s not a surprise. Fiscal stimulus is not stimulating in and of itself.”

— Milton Friedman

229. “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

230. “Children are responsible individuals in embryo. They have ultimate rights of their own and are not simply the playthings of their parents.”

— Milton Friedman

231. “The growing role that the government has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only the enormous waste of taxpayers money but also to a far poorer educational system.”

— Milton Friedman

232. “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

233. “The only reason free markets have a ghost of a chance is that they are so much more efficient than any other form of organization.”

— Milton Friedman

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

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239. “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

240. “Here, too, we tend to be schizophrenic. We would all like to see government spending go down, provided it is not spending that benefits us. We would all like to see deficits reduced, provided it is through taxes imposed on others.”

— Milton Friedman

241. “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

242. “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

243. “Everywhere, and at all times, economic progress has meant far more to the poor than to the rich.”

— Milton Friedman

244. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

247. “I believe that the monetary stability is an absolutely critical element in the satisfactory operation of a system.”

— Milton Friedman

248. “Personal freedom has grown greatly within China, and that will provoke ever more points of conflict between the individual and state.”

— Milton Friedman

249. “I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.”

— Milton Friedman

250. “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

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