Top 300 Milton Friedman Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Abraham Lincoln talked about a government of the people, by the people, for the people. What we now have is a government of the people, by the bureaucrats, including the legislators who have become bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats.”

— Milton Friedman

202. “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

203. “It doesn’t worry me a bit that China and Japan hold so much US debt. In a way, it seems foolish for them to do it because they get lower returns than they might elsewhere. But that is their business.”

— Milton Friedman

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven’t cut taxes enough.”

— Milton Friedman

208. “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

209. “With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.”

— Milton Friedman

210. “A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.”

— Milton Friedman

211. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “Not all ‘schooling’ is ‘education,’ and not all ‘education’ is ‘schooling’.”

— Milton Friedman

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

223. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

225. “How did we make the transition from using wood to using coal, from using coal to using oil, from using oil to using natural gas? How in God’s name did we make that transition without a Federal Energy Agency?”

— Milton Friedman

226. “John Lott documents how far ‘politically correct’ vested interests are willing to go to denigrate anyone who dares disagree with them. Lott has done us all a service by his thorough, thoughtful scholarly approach to a highly controversial issue.”

— Milton Friedman

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “The widespread enthusiasm for reducing government taxes and other impositions is not matched by a comparable enthusiasm for eliminating government programs – except programs that benefit other people. The.”

— Milton Friedman

233. “It is extremely convenient to have a label for the political and economic viewpoint elaborated in this book. The rightful and proper label is liberalism. Unfortunately, “As a supreme, if unintended compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label”,′ so that liberalism has, in the United States, come to have a very different meaning than it did in the nineteenth century or does today over much of the Continent of Europe.”

— Milton Friedman

234. “Although these examples only scratch the surface, they illustrate the fundamental proposition that freedom is one whole, that anything that reduces freedom in one part of our lives is likely to affect freedom in the other parts.”

— Milton Friedman

235. “To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.”

— Milton Friedman

236. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

238. “I’d like to promote lots of things. I’d like to promote elimination of drug prohibition. I’d like to promote parental choice in education through vouchers. Those are two things I think are very urgent and important. They’re both more important than the harm which Social Security will do.”

— Milton Friedman

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

— Milton Friedman

240. “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument. And the emotional faculties are more highly developed in most men than the rational, paradoxically or especially even in those who regard themselves as intellectuals.”

— Milton Friedman

241. “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

242. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

244. “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

245. “Highway Congestion We all complain about highway congestion. That is interesting for a different reason. The private automobile industry is able to produce all the automobiles anybody wants to drive, but the government is apparently not able to produce a comparably adequate highway system, a clear contrast.”

— Milton Friedman

246. “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

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

— Milton Friedman

248. “Germany cannot get out of the euro. What it has to do, therefore, is make the economy more flexible – to eliminate the restrictions on prices, on wages and on employment; in short, the regulations that keep 10 percent of the German workforce unemployed.”

— Milton Friedman

249. “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

250. “The state of our educational system is a disgrace to our country. We have an elementary and secondary school system in which close to half of the youngsters never graduate properly. It’s a disgrace that there is more illiteracy today than there was 100 years ago.”

— Milton Friedman