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
A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.
Making prohibition work is like making water run uphill; it's against nature.
The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.
The argument for collectivism is simple; free market is not.
The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.
Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.
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.
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
When you argue for free markets, you are arguing against the trend.
The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.
Economic freedom is ... an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.
A free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.