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
You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.
One man's opportunism is another man's statesmanship.
Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's disadvantaged to become tomorrow's privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.
Germany has a very able and productive workforce. It has high-quality products that are valued all over the world. It has every opportunity to be a productive, growing state. It just has to give its entrepreneurs a chance. It has to let them make money, hire and fire, and act like entrepreneurs.
The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights...This implies a belief in the equality of man in one sense; in their inequality in another.
What you have as a result of past policies is that German entrepreneurs go outside of Germany for many of their activities. They are investing abroad instead of at home because there isn't the openness, fluidity and opportunity they find outside their borders.
The important issue is not how much inequality there is but how much opportunity there is for individuals to get out of the bottom classes and into the top. If there is enough movement upward, people will accept the efficiency of the markets. If you have opportunity, there is a great tolerance for inequality. That has been the saving grace of the American system.
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?