Quotes from Milton Friedman

A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty.

There is one thing, he said, that you can trust everybody to do and that is to put his interest above yours.

You can not simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.

Wherever you had Freedom, you had Capitalism.

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.

The public at large thinks that government is too big.

In every area, i.e. what protects the workers, the employers, the consumers.. it's always the existence of variety and alternatives.

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

There is a real function for government in respect to pollution: to set conditions and, in particular, define property rights to make sure that the costs are borne by the parties responsible.

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

a private enterprise is a failure, it closes down—unless it can get a government subsidy to keep it going; if a government enterprise fails, it is expanded. I challenge you to find exceptions. The

Se colocarmos o Estado para administrar o Deserto do Saara, em 5 anos faltará areia.

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.

Many other unions have taken advantage of this exemption and are better interpreted as enterprises selling the services of cartellizing an industry than as labor organizations. The Teamster's Union is perhaps the most notable.

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

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.

The people in one district can choose not to reelect their member of Congress, but that will not change the composition of the government as a whole. You have to change the system and make it possible for the people's will to be heard.

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

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.

From the founding of the Republic to 1929, spending by governments at all levels, federal, state, and local, never exceeded 12 percent of the national income except in time of major war, and two-thirds of that was state and local spending. Federal spending typically amounted to 3 percent or less of the national income.

A solução do governo para um problema é normalmente tão ruim quanto o próprio problema.

YOU ARE THE SPENDER

From this standpoint, the role of the market, as already noted, is that it permits unanimity without conformity; that it is a system of effectively proportional representation

The only person who can truly persuade you is yourself. You must turn the issues over in your mind at leisure, consider the many arguments, let them simmer, and after a long time turn your preferences into convictions.