Milton Friedman Quotes

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.

Many other unions have taken advantage of this exemption and are better interpreted as enterprises selling the services of cartellizing an industry than as labor organizations. The Teamster’s Union is perhaps the most notable.

The major way that society has come to agree on the rules of property is through the growth of common law, though more recently legislation has played an increasing role.

I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.

Freedom is a rare and delicate plant

The elementary truth is that the Great Depression was produced by government mismanagement. It was not produced by the failure of private enterprise, it was produced by the failure of government to perform a function which had been assigned to it.

We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas.

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.

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” — Justice Louis Brandeis,

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.

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

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?

"Instead of Lincoln's government "of the people, by the people, and for the people," we now have a government "of the people, by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats," including the elected representatives who have become bureaucrats."

On another level compulsion would change matters drastically: the kind of society that would emerge if such acts of redistribution were voluntary is altogether different — and, by our standards, infinitely preferable — to the kind that would emerge if redistribution were compulsory.

A liberal is fundamentally fearful of concentrated power. His objective is to preserve the maximum degree of freedom for each individual separately that is compatible with one man's freedom not interfering with other men's freedom. He believes that this objective requires that power be dispersed. He is suspicious of assigning to government any functions that can be performed through the market, both because this substitutes coercion for voluntary co-operation in the area in question and because, by giving government an increased role, it threatens freedom in other areas.