Milton Friedman Quotes

Inflation is taxation without representation.

To take a different example, whether it is less costly for loggers to use a chain saw or handsaw depends on the price of the chain saw and the handsaw, the amount of labor required with each, and the wages of different kinds of labor. The enterprise doing the logging has an incentive to acquire the relevant technical knowledge and to combine it with the information transmitted by prices in order to minimize costs.

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

The term money has two very different meanings in popular discourse. We often speak of someone "making money," when we really mean that he or she is receiving an income. We do not mean that he or she has a printing press in the basement churning out greenbacked pieces of paper. In this use, money is a synonym for income or receipts; it refers to a flow, to income or receipts per week or per year. We also speak of someone's having money in his or her pocket or in a safe-deposit box or on deposit at a bank. In that use, money refers to an asset, a component of one's total wealth. Put differently, the first use refers to an item on a profit-and-loss statement, the second to an item on a balance sheet

They think that the cure to big government is to have bigger government... the only effective cure is to reduce the scope of government - get government out of the business.

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.

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

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.

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.

The broader and more influential organisations of businessmen have acted to undermine the basic foundation of the free market system they purport to represent and defend.

The business of business is business.

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

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

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.

Similarly, Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French political philosopher and sociologist, in his classic Democracy in America, written after a lengthy visit in the 1830s, saw equality, not majority rule, as the outstanding characteristic of America. “In America,” he wrote, the aristocratic element has always been feeble from its birth; and if at the present day it is not actually destroyed, it is at any rate so completely disabled, that we can scarcely assign to it any degree of influence on the course of affairs.