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Milton Friedman

165 quotes

• “We want the kind of world in which greedy people can do the least harm to their fellow men. That’s the kind of world in which power is widely dispersed and each of us has as many alternatives as possible.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Perfect competition is a theoretical concept like the Euclidian line, which has no width or depth. Just as we’ve never seen that line there has never been truly free enterprise.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “How much attention is paid to agreement between Galbraith and myself in opposing a draft and favoring an all-volunteer armed force, or in opposing tariffs and favoring free trade, or on a host of other issues? What is newsworthy is that Galbraith endorses wage and price controls, while I oppose them.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Just as banks all around the country were closing, the Fed raised the discount rate; that's the rate they charge for loans to banks. Bank failures consequently increased spectacularly. We might have had an economic downturn in the thirties anyway, but in the absence of the Federal Reserve System—with its enormous power to make a bad situation worse—it wouldn't have been anything like the scale we experienced.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Although I wish the anarchists luck, since that’s the way we ought to be moving now. But I believe we need government to enforce the rules of the game. By prosecuting anti-trust violations, for instance. We need a government to maintain a system of courts that will uphold contracts and rule on compensation for damages. We need a government to ensure the safety of its citizens–to provide police protection. But government is failing at a lot of these things that it ought to be doing because it’s involved in so many things it shouldn’t be doing.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The essence of the problem is that once we begin to allow exceptions for special interests, we move from a system of private arrangements to a political system where everyone’s freedom is limited and government becomes a matter of trying to balance those interests. Nobody really wins under these terms.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn’t really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it and doesn’t just talk about it, he wants to have the right amount of pollution. We can’t really afford to eliminate it—not without abandoning all the benefits of technology that we not only enjoy but on which we depend. So the answer is to allow only pollution that’s worth what it costs, and not any pollution that isn’t worth what it costs.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The average income of blacks here is far higher than the average income of all the people in the Soviet Union. The official government definition of the poverty line in the U.S. is higher than the average income in the Soviet Union; it’s higher than the income received by 90 percent of the people on the world’s surface. Now, that doesn’t mean blacks aren’t subject to injustice; of course they are.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “What country in the world today engages in the most extreme anti-Semitic persecution? The Soviet Union. It’s not an accident, because if you have a society with concentrated power, if you have a collectivist society, it’s going to be in a position to exercise the preferences and prejudices of its rulers. Moreover, it’s going to have an incentive to do so, because it’s going to need a scapegoat and it will choose some group like the Jews or the blacks to be the scapegoat.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The price system works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time. We never realize how well it functions until it is prevented from functioning, and even then we seldom recognize the source of the trouble.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Prices perform three functions in organizing economic activity: first, they transmit information; second, they provide an incentive to adopt those methods of production that are least costly and thereby use available resources for the most highly valued pur poses; third, they determine who gets how much of the product—the distribution of income. These three functions are closely in terrelated.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The price system transmits only the important information and only to the people who need to know.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union — like public housing in the United States — look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The supporters of tariffs treat it as self-evident that the creation of jobs is a desirable end, in and of itself, regardless of what the persons employed do. That is clearly wrong. If all we want are jobs, we can create any number—for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs—jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The threat to public schools arises from their defects, not their accomplishments. In small, closely knit communities where public schools, particularly elementary schools, are now reasonably satisfactory, not even the most comprehensive voucher plan would have much effect. The public schools would remain dominant, perhaps somewhat improved by the threat of potential competition. But elsewhere, and particularly in the urban slums where the public schools are doing such a poor job, most parents would undoubtedly try to send their children to nonpublic schools.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A worker is protected from his employer by the existence of other employers for who he can go to work. An employer is protected from exploitation by his employees by the existence of other workers whom he can hire. The consumer is protected from exploitation by a given seller by the existence of other sellers from whom he can buy.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The smaller the unit of government and the more restricted the functions assigned government, the less likely it is that its actions will reflect special interests rather than the general interest.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the . That's literally true.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “One reason why money is a mystery to so many is the role of myth or fiction or convention.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Why should they also be accepted by private persons in private transactions in exchange for goods and services? The short answer—and the right answer—is that private persons accept these pieces of paper because they are confident that others will. The pieces of green paper have value because everybody thinks they have value. Everybody thinks they have value because in everybody's experience they have had value...”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Analysis of the supply of money, and in particular of changes in the supply of money, is simple in principle but extremely complex in practice, both in our hypothetical world and in the current real world. Simple in principle, because the supply of money is whatever the monetary authorities make if, complex in practice, because the decisions of the monetary authorities depend on numerous factors.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “For both long and short periods there is a consistent though not precise relation between the rate of growth of the quantity of money and the rate of growth of nominal income. If the quantity of money grows rapidly, so will nominal income, and conversely. The relation is much closer for long than for short periods”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Over short periods, the relation between growth in money and growth in nominal income is often hard to see, partly because the relation is less close for short than for long periods, but mostly because it takes time for changes in monetary growth to affect income. And how long a time is itself variable. Today's income growth is not closely related to today's monetary growth; it depends on what has been happening to money in the past. What happens to money today affects what is going to happen to income in the future”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Never underestimate the role of luck in the fate of individuals or of nations.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A largely parallel example involving human behavior has been used elsewhere by Savage and me. Consider the problem of predicting the shots made by an expert billiard player. It seems not at all unreasonable that excellent predictions would be yielded by the hypothesis that the billiard player made his shots as if he knew the complicated mathematical formulas that would give the optimum directions of travel, could estimate accurately by eye the angles, etc., describing the location of the balls, could make lightning calculations from the formulas, and could then make the balls travel in the direction indicated by the formulas. Our confidence in this hypothesis is not based on the belief that billiard players, even expert ones, can or do go through the process described; it derives rather from the belief that, unless in some way or other they were capable of reaching essentially the same result, they would not in fact be expert billiard players. It is only a short step from these examples to the economic hypothesis that under a wide range of circumstances individual firms behave as if they were seeking rationally to maximize their expected returns (generally if misleadingly called "profits") and had full knowledge of the data needed to succeed in this attempt; as if, that is, they knew the relevant cost and demand functions, calculated marginal cost and marginal revenue from all actions open to them, and pushed each line of action to the point at which the relevant marginal cost and marginal revenue were equal. Now, of course, businessmen do not actually and literally solve the system of simultaneous equations in terms of which the mathematical economist finds it convenient to express this hypothesis, any more than leaves or billiard players explicitly go through complicated mathematical calculations or falling bodies decide to create a vacuum. The billiard player, if asked how he decides where to hit the ball, may say that he "just figures it out" but then also rubs a rabbit's foot just to make sure; and the businessman may well say that he prices at average cost, with of course some minor deviations when the market makes it necessary. The one statement is about as helpful as the other, and neither is a relevant test of the associated hypothesis.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Methodology of Positive Economics" (1953)

• “Now, when anybody starts talking about this [an all-volunteer force] he immediately shifts language. My army is 'volunteer,' your army is 'professional,' and the enemy's army is 'mercenary.' All these three words mean exactly the same thing. I am a volunteer professor, I am a mercenary professor, and I am a professional professor. And all you people around here are mercenary professional people. And I trust you realize that. It's always a puzzle to me why people should think that the term 'mercenary' somehow has a negative connotation. I remind you of that wonderful quotation of Adam Smith when he said, 'You do not owe your daily bread to the benevolence of the baker, but to his proper regard for his own interest.' And this is much more broadly based. In fact, I think mercenary motives are among the least unattractive that we have.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Draft: A Handbook of Facts and Alternatives, Sol Tax, edit., chapter: “Recruitment of Military Manpower Solely by Voluntary Means,” chairman: Aristide Zolberg, University of Chicago Press (1967) p. 366, based on the…

• “They had cliche answers but only to their self-created straw-men. To exaggerate only slightly, they had never talked to anyone who really believed, and had thought deeply about, views drastically different from their own. As a result, when they heard real arguments instead of caricatures, they had no answers, only amazement that such views could be expressed by someone who had the external characteristics of being a member of the intellectual community, and that such views could be defended with apparent cogency. Never have I been more impressed with the advice I once received: "You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Schools at Chicago3.” University of Chicago Record, 1974

• “This leads to my next myth—the myth that government can spend money at nobody’s expense. What was really involved in that last story was that somehow the local people do not pay out the money coming down from Washington somebody else does. Of course, the truth is that the money makes a round trip between Florida and Washington, and there is a discount taken off for cash as it passes through Washington. Some of you may remember that wonderful description of government by the French economist, Frederic Bastiat, who said that government is that fiction whereby everybody believes that he can live at the expense of everybody else.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Economic Myths and Public Opinion”, The Alternative: An American Spectator, vol. 9, no. 4, (January 1976) pp. 5-9

• “That is a widespread myth, that it is possible to spend money with nobody paying for it. You have everybody screaming that we ought to have new, bigger, more generous government programs. Where are we going to raise the money? Tax business. But business corporations can’t pay any taxes. A corporate executive may sign the check, but where does he get the money? From his stockholders or from his customers or from his employees. Unlike the federal government, he doesn’t have a printing press in his basement. So the only way he can pay money to the government is imposing a burden on somebody. Government cannot spend money at nobody’s expense.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Economic Myths and Public Opinion”, The Alternative: An American Spectator, vol. 9, no. 4, (January 1976) pp. 5-9

• “Let me take the example which is today the greatest sacred cow of them all—Social Security. Was there an overwhelming demand for Social Security in the 1930s when the law was adopted? Far from it. There was no public demand for it, it had to be sold. How was it sold? By the slickest devices of Madison Avenue, by imaginative packaging and deceptive labeling. Social Security was sold as an insurance scheme. It is not an insurance scheme. There is very little relationship to the amount of money any one individual pays and the amount of money he is entitled to receive. Social Security is a combination of a bad tax system with a bad way of distributing welfare… If you look at the tax system, who could defend a wage tax, a tax on wages up to a maximum, a tax on work, a tax which discourages employers from hiring people, and discourages people from going to work; a tax which is borne by the lowest wage group, workers? It is a regressive tax. You could never in a million Sundays… have gotten such a tax passed as a tax.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Milton Friedman Speaks - Myths That Conceal Reality” (1977)

• “There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise … and yet we need taxes. We have to recognize that we must not hope for a Utopia that is unattainable. I would like to see a great deal less government activity than we have now, but I do not believe that we can have a situation in which we don't need government at all. We do need to provide for certain essential government functions — the national defense function, the police function, preserving law and order, maintaining a judiciary. So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in The Times Herald, Norristown, Pennsylvania (1 December 1978)

• “Is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it's only the other fellow who's greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it's exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: from an interview with Phil Donahue (1979): partial transcript from SiP TV ; or find link to full interview in the External links Section

• “[I]t is very hard to achieve good objectives through bad means. And the means we have been using are bad in two very different respects. In the first place, all of these programs involve some people spending other people’s money for objectives that are determined by still a third group of people. Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody has the same dedication to achieving somebody else’s objectives that he displays when he pursues his own. Beyond this, the [welfare] programs have an insidious effect on the moral fiber of both the people who administer the programs and the people who are supposedly benefiting from it. For the people who administer it, it instills in them a feeling of almost Godlike power. For the people who are supposedly benefiting it instills a feeling of childlike dependence. Their capacity for personal decision making atrophies. The result is that the programs involved are misuse of money, they do not achieve the objectives which it was their intention to achieve. But far more important than this, they tend to rot away the very fabric that holds a decent society together.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Free to Choose: From Cradle to Grave,” episode 4, PBS telecast the series (1980)

• “Whether it is in the slums of New Delhi or in the affluence of Las Vegas, it simply isn't fair that there should be any losers. Life is unfair — there is nothing fair about one man being born blind and another man being born with sight. There is nothing fair about one man being born of a wealthy parent and one of an impecunious parent. There is nothing fair about Muhammad Ali having been born with a skill that enables him to make millions of dollars one night. There is nothing fair about Marlene Dietrich having great legs that we all want to watch. There is nothing fair about any of that. But on the other hand, don't you think a lot of people who like to look at Marlene Dietrich's legs benefited from nature's unfairness in producing a Marlene Dietrich. What kind of a world would it be if everybody was an absolute identical duplicate of anybody else. You might as well destroy the whole world and just keep one specimen left for a museum. In the same way, it's unfair that Muhammad Ali should be a great fighter and should be able to earn millions. But would it not be even more unfair to the people who like to watch him if you said that in the pursuit of some abstract idea of equality we're not going to let Muhammad Ali get more for one nights fight than the lowest man on the totem pole can get for a days unskilled work on the docks. You can do that but the result of that would be to deny people the opportunity to watch Muhammad Ali. I doubt very much he would be willing to subject himself to the kind of fights he's gone through if he were to get the pay of an unskilled docker.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: From Created Equal, an episode of the PBS Free to Choose television series (1980, vol. 5 transcript).

• “So far, twenty-two people have received the Nobel award in economics. Not one of them has been female—so, to judge only from the past, the most important thing to do if you want to be a Nobel laureate is to be male. I hasten to add that the absence of females is not, I believe, attributable to male chauvinist bias on the part of the Swedish Nobel Committee. I believe that the economics profession as a whole would have been nearly unanimous that, during the period in question, only one female candidate met the relevant standards—the English economist Joan Robinson, who has since died. The failure of the Nobel Committee to award her a prize may well have reflected bias but not sex bias. The economists here will understand what I am talking about. … A second requirement is to be a U.S. citizen. Twelve of the twenty-two recipients of the Nobel Prize were from the United States, four from the United Kingdom, two from Sweden, and one each from four other countries. … Of the twelve Americans who have won the Nobel Prize in economics, nine either studied or taught at the University of Chicago. So the next lesson is to go to the University of Chicago.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Milton Friedman", lecture in March 1985, published in William Breit and Roger W. Spencer (ed.) Lives of the laureates (5th ed., 2009)

• “The stock of money, prices and output was decidedly more unstable after the establishment of the Reserve System than before. The most dramatic period of instability in output was, of course, the period between the two wars, which includes the severe (monetary) contractions of 1920-1, 1929-33, and 1937-8. No other 20 year period in American history contains as many as three such severe contractions. This evidence persuades me that at least a third of the price rise during and just after World War I is attributable to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System... and that the severity of each of the major contractions — 1920-1, 1929-33 and 1937-8 is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities... Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes — excusable or not — can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic — this is the key political argument against an independent central bank... To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is much too serious a matter to be left to the central bankers.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in The Money Masters (1995)

• “In the course of General Westmoreland's testimony, he made the statement that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. I stopped him and said, 'General, would you rather command an army of slaves?' He drew himself up and said, 'I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.' I replied, 'I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries.' But I went on to say, 'If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher.' That was the last that we heard from the general about mercenaries.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Two Lucky People: Memoirs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1998) p. 380.

• “I was not in Chile as a guest of the government. I was in Chile as the guest of a private organization… I must say, it's such a wonderful example of a double standard, because I had spent time in Yugoslavia, which was a communist country. I later gave a series of lectures in China. When I came back from communist China, I wrote a letter to the Stanford Daily newspaper in which I said, '"It's curious. I gave exactly the same lectures in China that I gave in Chile. I have had many demonstrations against me for what I said in Chile. Nobody has made any objections to what I said in China. How come?”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Commanding Heights, Interview on PBS”, (Oct. 1, 2000)

• “There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: 'Your World' Interview With Economist Milton Friedman" Fox News interview (May 2004)

• “The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather 'What can I and my compatriots do through government' to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect? Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “As it developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the intellectual movement that went under the name of liberalism emphasized freedom as the ultimate goal and the individual as the ultimate entity in the society. It supported laissez faire at home as a means of reducing the role of the state in economic affairs and thereby enlarging the role of the individual; it supported free trade abroad as a means of linking the nations of the world together peacefully and democratically. In political matters, it supported the development of representative government and of parliamentary institutions, reduction in the arbitrary power of the state, and protection of the civil freedoms of individuals.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 : the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the general trend of historical development. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions. So also did political freedom in the golden age of Greece and in the early days of the Roman era. History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Ch. 1 The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom, 2002 edition, p. 10

• “A government which maintained law and order, defined property rights, served as a means whereby we could modify property rights and other rules of the economic game, adjudicated disputes about the interpretation of the rules, enforced contracts, promoted competition, provided a monetary framework, engaged in activities to counter technical monopolies and to overcome neighborhood effects widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify government intervention, and which supplemented private charity and the private family in protecting the irresponsible, whether madman or child—such a government would clearly have important functions to perform. The consistent liberal is not an anarchist.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The view has been gaining widespread acceptance that corporate officials and labor leaders have a "social responsibility"... beyond serving the interests of their stockholders or their members. This view shows a fundamental misconception of the character of a free economy. In such an economy there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its 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. Similarly, the "social responsibility" of labor leaders is to serve the interests of the members of their unions. It is the responsibility of the rest of us to establish a framework of law such that an individual... is, to quote Adam Smith... "led by an ... I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine. If businessmen do have a social responsibility other than making maximum profits for stockholders, how are they to know what it is? Can self-selected private individuals decide what the social interest is? Can they decide how great a burden they are justified in placing on themselves or their stockholders to serve that social interest?”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Those of us who believe in freedom must believe also in the freedom of individuals to make their own mistakes. If a man knowingly prefers to live for today, to use his resources for current enjoyment, deliberately choosing a penurious old age, by what right do we prevent him from doing so? We may argue with him, seek to persuade him that he is wrong, but are we entitled to use coercion to prevent him from doing what he chooses to do? Is there not always the possibility that he is right and that we are wrong? Humility is the distinguishing virtue of the believer in freedom; arrogance, of the paternalist.”

  Milton Friedman (1912–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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