Authors:

Milton Friedman Quotes - Page 13

All Quotes Achievement Age Alcohol Army Business Capitalism Change Community Competition Concentration Country Currency Doubt Economics Economy Effort Euro Evil Federal Reserve Free Market Freedom Giving Gold Government Spending Great Depression Greed Growth Hayek Home Immigration Inequality Inflation Internet Judging Liberty Limited Government Losing Loss Military Opportunity Past Philosophy Politics Poverty Power Progress Prohibition Purpose Quality Reality Responsibility Running School Social Responsibility Taxes Today Trade Understanding Values Virtue War Wealth Welfare
The same thing will happen in China that happened in Chile. Political freedom will ultimately break out of its shackles. Tiananmen Square was only the first episode. It is headed for a series of Tiananmen Squares. It

The same thing will happen in China that happened in Chile. Political freedom will ultimately break out of its shackles. Tiananmen Square was only the first episode. It is headed for a series of Tiananmen Squares. It cannot continue to develop privately and at the same time maintain its authoritarian character politically. It is headed for a clash. Sooner or later, one or the other will give.

Milton Friedman
Character, Squares, Giving
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

A private enterprise system needs some measuring rod, it needs something, it needs money to make its transactions. You can't run a big complicated system through barter, through converting one commodity into another. You need a monetary system to operate. And the instability in that monetary system is devastating to the performance of the economy.

Milton Friedman
Running, Needs, Complicated
Source: www.pbs.org

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.

Milton Friedman
Responsibility, Acceptance, Foundation
Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.133, University of Chicago Press

. . I think the Adam Smith role was played in this cycle i.e. the late twentieth century collapse of socialism in which the idea of free-markets succeeded first, and then special events catalyzed a complete change of socio-political policy in countries around the world by Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

Milton Friedman
Country, Thinking, Ideas

I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity.

Milton Friedman
Political, Example, Economic
Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.9, University of Chicago Press

The important issue is not how much inequality there is but how much opportunity there is for individuals to get out of the bottom classes and into the top. If there is enough movement upward, people will accept the efficiency of the markets. If you have opportunity, there is a great tolerance for inequality. That has been the saving grace of the American system.

Milton Friedman
Opportunity, Class, Issues
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

What happened was that for every $100 of money, by which I mean the cash that people keep in their pockets, and the deposits they have in the bank, for every $100 of money that there was in 1929, by 1933 there was only $67. The Federal Reserve allowed the quantity of money to decline by a third. While, at all times, it had the possibilities and the power of preventing that from happening.

Milton Friedman
Mean, People, Pockets
Source: www.pbs.org

What would the people who sold us goods do with the money? They'd get dollars. What would they do with the dollars? Eat them?!

Milton Friedman
People, Dollars, Goods

There is only one social responsibility of business

Milton Friedman
Responsibility, Social, Social Responsibility
Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.133, University of Chicago Press

The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years.

Milton Friedman
Years, Tests, Next
"The Power of Choice: The Life and Ideas of Milton Friedman". Documentary, January 29, 2007.

The price works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time.

Milton Friedman
Time, Military, War
Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman (1990). “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement”, p.32, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Economists may not know how to run the economy, but they know how to create shortages or gluts simply by regulating prices below the market, or artificially supporting them from above.

Milton Friedman
Running, May, Economy

I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that... the severity of each of the contractions - 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38 - is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements.

Milton Friedman
Omission, Historical, Banking
Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.45, University of Chicago Press

That's an interesting paradox to think about. Make it legal and it's no good. Why? Because as long as it's illegal the people who come in do not qualify for welfare, they don't qualify for social security, they don't qualify for the other myriad of benefits that we pour out from our left pocket to our right pocket. So long as they don't qualify they migrate to jobs. They take jobs that most residents of this country are unwilling to take. They provide employers with the kind of workers that they cannot get. They're hard workers, they're good workers, and they are clearly better off.

Milton Friedman
Country, Jobs, Hard Work
"Illegal Immigration: A Feature, Not A Bug, Said Milton Friedman" by Brian Doherty, reason.com. May 11, 2011.

In this day and age, we need to revise the old saying to read, "Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

Milton Friedman
Hell Hath No Fury, Age, Needs
Milton Friedman, William Richard Allen (1983). “Bright promises, dismal performance: an economist's protest”, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.

Individual price and wage changes will not be prevented. In the main, price changes will simply be concealed by taking the form of changes in discounts, service, and quality, and wage changes, in overtime, perquisites and so on…. But to whatever extent the freeze is enforced, it will do harm by distorting relative prices.

Milton Friedman
Quality, Individual, Form
Milton Friedman (1975). “There's no such thing as a free lunch”, Open Court Publishing Company

People who intend only to seek their own benefit are “led by an invisible hand to serve a public interest which was no part of” their intention. I say that there is a reverse invisible hand: People who intend to serve only the public interest are led by an invisible hand to serve private interests which was no part of their intention.

Milton Friedman
Hands, Invisible Hand, People
"Why Government Is the Problem".

[T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends.

Milton Friedman
Government, Investing, Burden

What's the difference? How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There's a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not?

Milton Friedman
Differences, People, Why Not

China's productive system draws upon the other East Asian countries to a great extent. The volume of trade is much larger than the net amount being exported from China. China needs substantial reserves to finance all that.

Milton Friedman
Country, Asian, East
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

If China don't free up the political side, its economic growth will come to an end - while it is still at a very low level.

Milton Friedman
Political, Growth, Levels
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

If the US government spends 40 percent of the nation's income, as it does through either borrowing or taxes, that income is not available for people to spend. The deficit is an indirect method of taxation. Of course, politicians prefer to borrow instead of tax because then someone down the road has to deal with the consequences.

Milton Friedman
Government, People, Doe
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

If you look at the balance sheet, the US is heavily in debt. If you look at the income account - the amount of interest the US pays abroad - it is almost exactly equal to the amount of interest that it receives from abroad. American assets held abroad are earning a higher rate of return than foreign assets held here.

Milton Friedman
Balance, Income, Looks
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

There is no good way of measuring poverty.

Milton Friedman
Way, Poverty, Measuring
Source: www.pbs.org

My monetary studies have led me to the conclusion that central banks could profitably be replaced by computers geared to provide a steady rate of growth in the quantity of money. Fortunately for me personally, and for a select group of fellow economists, that conclusion has had no practical impact… else there would have been no Central Bank of Sweden to have established the award [Nobel Prize] I am honoured to receive.

Milton Friedman
Impact, Awards, Sweden
Milton Friedman's Speech at the Nobel Banquet, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 1976.

You May Also Like: