Misattributed Milton Friedman Quotes

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. ~ Pierre Dos Utt

With the passing of Milton Friedman on November 16, 2006, we lost one of the great champions of free markets. ~ Steve Hanke

Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else's parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds. ~ Milton Friedman

Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without. ~ Milton Friedman

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit. ~ Milton Friedman

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

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. ~ Milton Friedman

This points to a nagging and important question about free-market ideologues: Are they 'true believers', driven by ideology and faith that free markets will cure underdevelopment, as is often asserted, or do the ideas and theories frequently serve as an elaborate rationale to allow people to act on unfettered greed while still invoking an altruistic motive? ~ Naomi Klein

Business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the
chief sources of danger ... Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that's a different question. We have to have that tariff to protect us against competition from abroad. We have to have that special provision in the tax code. We have to have that subsidy. ~ Milton Friedman

The Founding Fathers envisioned a federal government that trusts its people with their money and freedom, outlining this limited, non-intrusive federal government in ... the Constitution, leaving the other powers to people ... or to the states. ~ Milton Friedman

Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated - a system of checks and balances. ~ Milton Friedman

He moves fastest who moves alone. ~ Milton Friedman

Many thinkers have tried to "naturalize" consumerism in that way, including most social Darwinists, Austrian School economists (Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard), Chicago School economists (George Stigler, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker), Darwinian libertarians, globalization advocates, management gurus, and marketers. Their model (which I call the Wrong Conservative Model, because I think it's wrong, and because it's usually advocated by political conservatives) is: human nature + free markets = consumerist capitalism ~ Geoffrey Miller

All of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from unemployment. It has come from figuring out how to produce more goods with fewer workers, thereby releasing labor to be more productive in other areas. It has never come about through permanent unemployment, but temporary unemployment, in the process of shifting people from one area to another. ~ Milton Friedman

Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest? ... And just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us. ~ Milton Friedman

The drive for equality failed for a much more fundamental reason. It went against one of the most basic instincts of all human beings. In the words of Adam Smith, "The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition"9 - and, one may add, the condition of his children and his children's children. Smith, of course, meant by "condition" not merely material well-being, though certainly that was one component. He had a much broader concept in mind, one that included all of the values by which men judge their success - in particular the kind of social values that gave rise to the outpouring of philanthropic activities in the nineteenth century. ~ Milton Friedman

The Soviet experience was much worse than experts in the West had thought. That discovery had a tremendous impact both on the intellectual community and on the public at large. ~ Milton Friedman

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

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

But on the other hand, if you come under circumstances where each person is entitled to a pro-rata share of the pot, to take an extreme example, or even to a low level of the pie, than the effect of that situation is that free immigration, would mean a reduction of everybody to the same, uniform level. Of course, I'm exaggerating, it wouldn't go quite that far, but it would go in that direction. And it is that perception, that leads people to adopt what at first seems like inconsistent values. ~ Milton Friedman

The fall of the Berlin Wall really demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was a bad system, and what subsequently happened in the Soviet Union, that that system was a failure. ~ Milton Friedman

What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself. ~ Milton Friedman

The Great Depression was not a sign of the failure of monetary policy or a result of the failure of the market system as was widely interpreted. It was instead a consequence of a very serious government failure, in particular a failure in the monetary authorities to do what they'd initially been set up to do. ~ Milton Friedman

Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. ~ Milton Friedman

The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. ~ Milton Friedman

How did we make the transition from using wood to using coal, from using coal to using oil, from using oil to using natural gas? How in God's name did we make that transition without a Federal Energy Agency? ~ Milton Friedman

There's only one thing that all of the central banks control and that is the base, their own liability, and they can control that in various ways. They can control it directly by open market operations, buying and selling government securities or other assets, for example, buying and selling gold, or they can control it indirectly by altering the rate at which banks lend to one another. ~ Milton Friedman

There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes. ~ Milton Friedman

Both the fragmentation of power and the conflicting government policies are rooted in the political realities of a democratic system that operates by enacting detailed and specific legislation. Such a system tends to give undue political power to small groups that have highly concentrated interests, to give greater weight to obvious, direct, and immediate effects of government action than to possibly more important but concealed, indirect, and delayed effects, to set in motion a process that sacrifices the general interest to serve special interests, rather than the other way around. There is, as it were, an invisible hand in politics that operates in precisely the opposite direction to Adam Smith's invisible hand. Individuals who intend only to promote the general interest are led by the invisible political hand to promote a special interest that they had no intention to promote. ~ Milton Friedman

I can understand the teachers saying it's a gun at my head, but they've got the same gun at the parents' head at the moment. The parent goes up to the teacher and says, well, I'm not satisfied with what you're doing, and the teacher can say, well tough. You can't take him away, you can't move him, you can't do what you like, so go away and stop bothering me. That can be the attitude of some teachers today, and often is. But now that the positions are being reversed [with vouchers] and the roles are changed, I can only say tough on the teachers. Let them pull their socks up and give us a better deal and let us participate more. ~ Milton Friedman

The major basis for my opposition to marijuana prohibition has not been how badly it's worked, the fact that it's produced much more harm than good - it has been primarily a moral reason: I don't think the state has any more right to tell me what to put into my mouth than it has to tell me what can come out of my mouth. ~ Milton Friedman

Government spends somebody else's money on somebody else. ~ Milton Friedman

We now know, as a few knew then, that the depression was not produced by a failure of private enterprise, but rather by a failure of government in an area in which the government had from the first been assigned responsibility - -"To coin money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin," in the words of Section 8, Article 1, of the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, as we shall see in Chapter 9, government failure in managing money is not merely a historical curiosity but continues to be a present-day reality. ~ Milton Friedman

If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don't be surprised if you get unemployment. ~ Milton Friedman

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

The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. ~ Milton Friedman

Undoubtedly Internet has reduced the possibilities of taxation. Why should I buy something here if I can buy it from a company in Japan or England or Brazil with a lower tax? ~ Milton Friedman

So far as we know, no pollster has asked the public, "Are you getting your money's worth for the more than 40 percent of your income being spent on your behalf by government?" But ~ Milton Friedman

There's no doubt in my mind that Ronald Reagan was by far the greatest. Because he had real principles and he stuck by them. He made clear what he was going to do, and he did it. He didn't back down. ~ Milton Friedman

I am a limited-government libertarian. ~ Milton Friedman

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

The rule of law does not guarantee freedom, since general law as well as personal edicts can be tyrannical. But increasing reliance on the rule of law clearly played a major role in transforming Western society from a world in which the ordinary citizen was literally subject to the arbitrary will of his master to a world in which the ordinary citizen could regard himself as his own master ~ Milton Friedman