Words matter. These are the best Milton Friedman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property.
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
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.
Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.
The power to do good is also the power to do harm.
Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?
I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash – a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B without A knowing B or B knowing A.
I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.
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 empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.
Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
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.
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.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
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.
The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.
When government – in pursuit of good intentions – tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.
And what does reward virtue? You think the communist commissar rewards virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think, excuse me, if you’ll pardon me, American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout?
Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive.
