Milton Friedman Quotes

The Motor Carrier Act of 1935 gave the ICC jurisdiction over truckers — to protect the railroads, not the consumers.

The capital resources of the nation are not increased by using the tax collector rather than the stock market to mobilize them.

In the international trade area, the language is almost always about how we must export, and what’s really good is an industry that produces exports, and if we buy from abroad and import, that’s bad. But surely that’s upside-down. What we send abroad, we can’t eat, we can’t wear, we can’t use for our houses. The goods and services we send abroad, are goods and services not available to us. On the other hand, the goods and services we import, they provide us with TV sets we can watch, with automobiles we can drive, with all sorts of nice things for us to use.

The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is a cost of getting those imports. And the proper objective for a nation as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so that we get as large a volume of imports as possible, for as small a volume of exports as possible.

This carries over to the terminology we use. When people talk about a favorable balance of trade, what is that term taken to mean? It’s taken to mean that we export more than we import. But from the point of our well-being, that’s an unfavorable balance. That means we’re sending out more goods and getting fewer in. Each of you in your private household would know better than that. You don’t regard it as a favorable balance, when you have to send out more goods to get fewer coming in. It’s favorable when you can get more by sending out less.

We speak loosely of the “corporation’s income” or of “business” having an income. That is figurative language. The corporation is an intermediary between its owners — the stockholders — and the resources other than the stockholders’ capital, the services of which it purchases. Only people have incomes and they derive them through the market from the resources they own,

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.

Why is it that able, public-spirited people produce such different results according to whether they operate in the political or the economic market? Why is it that if a random sample of the people who read this essay and are not at present in Washington were to replace those who are in Washington, our policies would very likely not be improved? That is the real puzzle for me.

The two chief enemies of the free society or free enterprise are intellectuals on the one hand and businessmen on the other, for opposite reasons. Every intellectual believes in freedom for himself, but he's opposed to freedom for others. He thinks that the business world is different, that because of a chaos of competition and waste, there ought to be a central planning board that will establish social priorities. But he's horrified at the thought of having a central planning board to establish social priorities for writers and researchers. So the intellectuals favor freedom for themselves and oppose it for everybody else.

The businessmen are just the opposite — every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that's a different question. He's always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that and the other thing. And it's this coalition that's really difficult for us so I think we ought to be careful of according businessmen too much power, or of believing that they are the major source of support for a free society.

The hardest thing in the world to understand is that people operating separately, through their joint relations with one another, through market transactions, can achieve a greater degree of efficiency and of output than can a single central planner.

"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."

The fecundity of freedom is demonstrated most dramatically and clearly in agriculture. When the Declaration of Independence was enacted, fewer than 3 million persons of European and African origin (i.e., omitting the native Indians) occupied a narrow fringe along the eastern coast. Agriculture was the main economic activity. It took nineteen out of twenty workers to feed the country's inhabitants and provide a surplus for export in exchange for foreign goods. Today it takes fewer than one out of twenty workers to feed the 220 million inhabitants and provide a surplus that makes the United States the largest single exporter of food in the world.

"Many highly schooled people are uneducated, and many highly "educated" people are unschooled."

government to force people to act against their own immediate interests in order to promote a supposedly general interest.

The particular consequence that I find most indefensible is the havoc wreaked on residents of Colombia, Peru, and other countries because we cannot enforce our own laws. I have yet to hear an acceptable justification of that consequence.

Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised. In addition, by dispersing power, the free market provides an offset to whatever concentration of political power may arise.

Our gain from foreign trade is what we import. Exports are the price we pay to get imports. As Adam Smith saw so clearly, the citizens of a nation benefit from getting as large a volume of imports as possible in return for its exports, or equivalently, from exporting as little as possible to pay for its imports.