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
Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of drug-related crimes, but also on the belief that relieving our police and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drugs will enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to combatting other forms of crime. We would thus strike a double blow: reduce crime activity directly, and at the same time increase the efficacy of law enforcement and crime prevention.
We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas.
The real tragedy of minimum wage laws is that they are supported by well-meaning groups who want to reduce poverty. But the people who are hurt most by higher minimums are the most poverty stricken.
I am convinced that the minimum-wage law is the most anti-Negro law on our statute books in its effect, not its intent.
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
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.
Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?
When something goes wrong, the natural tendency is to say, "By God, we need to pass a law and do something."
I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they’re responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of.
A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
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.