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
If you really want to engage in policy activity, don't make that your vocation. Make it your avocation. Get a job. Get a secure base of income. Otherwise, you're going to get corrupted and destroyed.
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.
If you look at the balance sheet, the US is heavily in debt. If you look at the income account - the amount of interest the US pays abroad - it is almost exactly equal to the amount of interest that it receives from abroad. American assets held abroad are earning a higher rate of return than foreign assets held here.
The collapse of communism in essence added tens and tens of millions of people to the world labor supply, and the people who were added had previously been getting very low income, but they were not unskilled. Many of them were fairly well educated.
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.
I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government. And that's close to 40 percent of our national income.
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 somewhatless what he spends it on. When a man spends someone else's moneyto buy something for himself, he is very careful about what hebuys, but doesn't care at all how much he spends. And when a manspends someone else's money on someone else, he doesn't care howmuch he spends or what he spends it on. And that's governmentfor you.
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 strongly urge the voters of Colorado to reject Referendum C, or any action that would suspend Colorado's Taxpayers Bill of Rights. I strongly favor the continued and uninterrupted use of TABOR, including it's so called ratchet mechanism. The ratchet is one of the best features of TABOR. It is the only thing that will reduce out-of-control government spending.
Have all these countries found a genius like Greenspan? ... What the foreign experience suggests is, you don't need a genius. You just need someone willing to make fighting inflation his top priority.
One thing you can say about Lew, he is persistent. And he's consistent as well as persistent. He has a well-based position which he's figured out, and he sticks to it.
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.
Of course, we'd like to have another one, ... Though wouldn't it be better if we learned that we could do without one?
Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that's a different question. He's always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that and the other thing.