How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect? Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Milton Friedman More Quotes by Milton Friedman More Quotes From 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. Milton Friedman opening-up freedom government When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people. Milton Friedman awful wind people It all would have been much better if individuals saved for their own old age. Milton Friedman individual saved age Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. Milton Friedman freedom men mean The Federal Reserve the privately owned U.S. central bank definitely caused The Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one third from 1929 to 1933. Milton Friedman great-depression currency federal-reserve Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive. Milton Friedman columbus investing majority Making prohibition work is like making water run uphill; it's against nature. Milton Friedman freedom running water Statistics do not speak for themselves. Milton Friedman statistics speak Doing good with other people's money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else's money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people's money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force - sending a policeman to take the money from somebody's pocket - is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state. Milton Friedman philosophy two people The argument for the free market is a complicated and sophisticated one and depends on demonstration of secondary effects. I have confidence market efficiency will win out. Milton Friedman market-efficiency argument winning As a nation, we have been responsible for the murder of literally hundreds of thousands of people at home and abroad by fighting a war that should never have been started and can be won, if at all, only by converting the United States into a police state. Milton Friedman fighting home war In a free society, it is hard for 'good' people to do 'good', but that is a small price to pay for making it hard for 'evil' people to do 'evil', especially since one man's good is another's evil Milton Friedman good-people evil-people men The free market is not only a more efficient decision maker than even the wisest central planning body, but even more important, the free market keeps economic power widely dispersed. Milton Friedman body important decision My major problem with the world is a problem of scarcity in the midst of plenty ... of people starving while there are unused resources ... people having skills which are not being used. Milton Friedman greed skills people 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 Milton Friedman law doe ordinary The power to do good is also the power to do harm. Milton Friedman harm power A society that puts equality - in the sense of equality of outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's less well off to become tomorrow's rich, and in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a richer and fuller life. Milton Friedman opportunity mean hands I think it's a scandal what has been happening in the school system so far as lower income classes. The dropout rates, the illiteracy rate, you know literacy in the United States was a lot higher in 1890 than it is now. Milton Friedman class school thinking The same thing will happen in China that happened in Chile. Political freedom will ultimately break out of its shackles. Tiananmen Square was only the first episode. It is headed for a series of Tiananmen Squares. It cannot continue to develop privately and at the same time maintain its authoritarian character politically. It is headed for a clash. Sooner or later, one or the other will give. Milton Friedman squares giving character A private enterprise system needs some measuring rod, it needs something, it needs money to make its transactions. You can't run a big complicated system through barter, through converting one commodity into another. You need a monetary system to operate. And the instability in that monetary system is devastating to the performance of the economy. Milton Friedman complicated running needs
