Quotes from Milton Friedman

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

Indeed, 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.

To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.

Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.

The growing role that the government has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only the enormous waste of taxpayers money but also to a far poorer educational system.

There have been unions based on gold or silver, but not on fiat money - money tempted to inflate - put out by politically independent entities.

When they so-called 'target the interest rate', what they're doing is controlling the money supply via the interest rate. The interest rate is only an intermediary instrument.

The history of mankind is the history of money losing value.

Now that I'm 60, every morning I look in the mirror and say, "I don't know who you are, stranger, but I'm gonna shave you anyway".

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 heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights.

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.

If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven't cut taxes enough.

The government doesn't have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.

The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.

When something goes wrong, the natural tendency is to say, "By God, we need to pass a law and do something."

There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.

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

There is no good way of measuring poverty.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

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

Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.

Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.