Quotes by Milton Friedman

“Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.”

“We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.”

“Inflation is taxation without legislation”

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years thered be a shortage of sand”

“The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.”

“Governments never learn. Only people learn.”

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

“The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government”

“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”

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program”

“Theres no such thing as a free lunch.”

“The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.”

“Most economic fallacies derive - from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another”

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

“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

“I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever its possible.”

“Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.”

“What kind of society isnt structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system”

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

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.