Quotes About Milton Friedman

Fair' is in the eye of the beholder; 'free' is the verdict of the market. The word 'free' is used three times in the Declaration of Independence and once in the First Amendment to the Constitution, along with 'freedom.' The word 'fair' is not used in either of our founding documents.

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.

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.

It was in 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarizes the shock doctrine. Only a crisis-actual or percieved-produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

I took the obligatory economics classes in school, but I've long been a fan of the Milton Friedman philosophy and its libertarian bent: One must be free to do what one wants to do, as long as you don't harm another. This is the seminal treatise on free-market economics.

Conservatism, in its original sense, has no specific ideological content at all, since everything depends on what one is trying to conserve. In the last days of the Soviet Union, for example, those who were trying to preserve the existing Communist regime were rightly referred to as "conservatives," though what they were trying to conserve had nothing in common with what was advocated by Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek or William F. Buckley.

So many of the great thought leaders that have shaped economics - Gary Becker, Milton Friedman - what an unbelievable success story they've had in their field.

Economists agree about economics - and that's a science - and they disagree about economic policy because that's a value judgment... I've had profound disagreements on policy with the famous Milton Friedman. But, on economics, we agree.

And Milton Friedman was wrong: in the face of a really big shock, which pushes the economy into a liquidity trap, the central bank can't prevent a depression.

Minimum wage increases. The Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman has observed that the minimum wage is one of the most ... anti-black laws on the statute books because it destroys entry level jobs for second paycheck earners, teens, and other unskilled workers.

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.

So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist.