Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman
Milton Friedmanwas an American economist who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the second generation of Chicago price theory, a methodological movement at the University of Chicago's Department of Economics, Law School, and Graduate School of Business from the 1940s onward. Several students and young professors that were recruited...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth31 July 1912
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
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
The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the nineteenth century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good.
Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
I believe that the monetary stability is an absolutely critical element in the satisfactory operation of a system.
The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.
The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.
The stock market crashed in October 1929. But that was not the cause of what caused the Great Depression. It was, in my opinion, a very minor element of it. What happened was that from 1929 to 1933 you had a major contraction which, in my opinion, was caused primarily by the failure of the Federal Reserve System, to follow the course of action for which it was set up. It was set up to prevent exactly what happened from 1929 to 1933. But instead of preventing it, they facilitated it.
In response to a suggestion that total free trade would end in cheaper foreign products flooding the market and causing unemployment.
So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.
The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them.
If instead of looking at income, you look at levels of consumption, if anything that's become more equal. The fraction of families that have a dishwasher, that have a sewing machine, that have a television set. In respect to consumption, it's very hard to avoid the view that people have been getting more equal rather than more unequal.
The government doesn't have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.
Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.