3 December 2020 Milton Friedman The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman 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.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman 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.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman Well first of all, tell me, is there some society you know of that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed?
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman 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.
3 December 2020 Milton Friedman The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
