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 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.
You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.
Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.
The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash, a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B, without A knowing B or B knowing A.
When a man spends his own money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about how much he spends and how he spends it. When a man spends his own money to buy something for someone else, he is still very careful about how much he spends, but somewhat less what he spends it on. When a man spends someone else's money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about what he buys, but doesn't care at all how much he spends. And when a man spends someone else's money on someone else, he does't care how much he spends or what he spends it on. And that's government for you.
You can travel from one end of the industrialized world to the other and almost the only people you will find engaging in backbreaking toil are people who are doing it for sport. To find people whose day's toil has not been lightened by mechanical invention, you must go to the non-capitalist world.
I would say that in this world, the greatest source of inequality has been special privileges granted by government.
Adam Smith's key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange can take place unless both parties do benefit.
Cutting government spending and government intrusion in the economy will almost surely involve immediate gain for the many, short-term pain for the few, and long-term gain for all.
The big problem for a democratic government - democrat with a small "d" - is how to hold down government spending.
It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.
If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.
And where are you going to get these angels who are going to run society for us?
The Great Depression in the United States was caused - I won't say caused, was enormously intensified and made far worse than it would have been by bad monetary policy.