If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
Author
Milton Friedman
40 quotations
About Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism before shift…
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Milton FriedmanGovernments never learn. Only people learn.
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
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 ac…
Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
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A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
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.
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 e…
Inflation is taxation without legislation.
I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.
The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.