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52ee58a Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn't really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it, and doesn't just talk about it, he wants to have the of pollution. We can't really to eliminate it - not without abandoning all the benefits of technology that we not only enjoy but on which we depend. Milton Friedman
7fe8902 For example, the supporters of tariffs treat it as self-evident that the creation of jobs is a desirable end, in and of itself, regardless of what the persons employed do. That is clearly wrong. If all we want are jobs, we can create any number--for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. O.. work friedman job-creation jobs Milton Friedman
8b3140f There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves Milton Friedman
778894e The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny. Milton Friedman
5fea10d A society that puts equality--in the sense of equality of outcome--ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equa.. Milton Friedman
4f340c7 There is still a tendency to regard any existing government intervention as desirable, to attribute all evils to the market, and to evaluate new proposals for government control in their ideal form, as they might work if run by able, disinterested men free from the pressure of special interest groups. Milton Friedman
b522274 The ICC [Interstate Commerce Commission] illustrates what might be called the natural history of government intervention. A real or fancied evil leads to demands to do something about it. A political coalition forms consisting of sincere, high-minded reformers and equally sincere interested parties. The incompatible objectives of the members of the coalition (e.g., low prices to consumers and high prices to producers) are glossed over by fi.. politics Milton Friedman
8b36063 In the past century a myth has grown up that free market capitalism--equality of opportunity as we have interpreted that term--increases such inequalities, that it is a system under which the rich exploit the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wherever the free market has been permitted to operate, wherever anything approaching equality of opportunity has existed, the ordinary man has been able to attain levels of living never d.. Milton Friedman
5818b48 A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. Milton Friedman
fe3cbf7 The smaller the unit of government and the more restricted the functions assigned government, the less likely it is that its actions will reflect special interests rather than the general interest. Milton Friedman
31b5f55 The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm. Milton Friedman
fb0dc25 Believers in aristocracy and socialism share a faith in centralized rule, in rule by command rather than by voluntary cooperation. Milton Friedman
9bc52d6 Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. inflation monetary-policy Milton Friedman
a392f93 Although these examples only scratch the surface, they illustrate the fundamental proposition that freedom is one whole, that anything that reduces freedom in one part of our lives is likely to affect freedom in the other parts. Milton Friedman
f6c0437 None of this means that government does not have a very real function. Indeed, the tragedy is that because government is doing so many things it ought not to be doing, it performs the functions it ought to be performing badly. The basic functions of government are to defend the nation against foreign enemies, to prevent coercion of some individuals by others within the country, to provide a means of deciding on our rules, and to adjudicate .. Milton Friedman
15441fc The family, rather than the individual, has always been and remains today the basic building block of our society, though its hold has clearly been weakening--one of the most unfortunate consequences of the growth of government paternalism. Milton Friedman
106351d I have been enormously impressed by the role that pure chance plays in determining our life history. I was reminded of some famous lines of Robert Frost: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both I took the one less travled by, And that has made all the difference. Milton Friedman
81134e8 Only people have incomes and they derive them through the market from the resources they own, whether these be in the form of corporate stock, or of bonds, or of land, or of their personal capacity. Milton Friedman
33fe640 The role of government just considered is to do something that the market cannot do for itself, namely, to determine, arbitrate, and enforce the rules of the game. Milton Friedman
f2da68a There is all the difference in the world, however, between two kinds of assistance through government that seem superficially similar: first, 90 percent of us agreeing to impose taxes on ourselves in order to help the bottom 10 percent, and second, 80 percent voting to impose taxes on the top 10 percent to help the bottom 10 percent--William Graham Sumner's famous example of B and C deciding what D shall do for A. Milton Friedman
308df61 No one can disagree with the objectives of the legislation that culminated in the 1962 amendments. Of course it is desirable that the public be protected from unsafe and useless drugs. However, it is also desirable that new drug development should be stimulated, and that new drugs should be made available to those who can benefit from them as soon as possible. As is so often the case, one good objective conflicts with other good objectives... Milton Friedman
7a697b6 The harm done by the FDA does not result from defects in the people in charge--unless it be a defect to be human. Many have been able and devoted civil servants. However, social, political, and economic pressures determine the behavior of the people supposedly in charge of a government agency to a far greater extent than they determine its behavior. No doubt there are exceptions, but they are rare--almost as rare as barking cats. That does .. Milton Friedman
28f4834 Children are responsible individuals in embryo. They have ultimate rights of their own and are not simply the playthings of their parents. Milton Friedman
a875d41 I can understand the teachers saying it's a gun at my head, but they've got the same gun at the parents' head at the moment. The parent goes up to the teacher and says, well, I'm not satisfied with what you're doing, and the teacher can say, well tough. You can't take him away, you can't move him, you can't do what you like, so go away and stop bothering me. That can be the attitude of some teachers today, and often is. But now that the pos.. Milton Friedman
4ac906a There is no law of conservation which forces the growth of new centers of economic strength to be at the expense of existing centers. milton friedman
bb97793 At the end of World War II, we had wage and price controls. Under wartime inflationary conditions, many employers found it difficult to recruit employees. To get around the limitations of wage control, many began to offer health care as a fringe benefit to attract workers. As a new benefit, it took some years for the Internal Revenue Service to get around to requiring the cost of the medical care to be included in the reported taxable incom.. Milton Friedman
5b735c9 Every special group around the country tries to get its hands on whatever bits and pieces it can. The result is that there is hardly an issue on which government is not on both sides. For example, in one massive building in Washington some government employees are working full-time trying to devise and implement plans to spend our money to discourage us from smoking cigarettes. In another massive building, perhaps miles away from the first,.. Milton Friedman
62a4128 Social responsibility is a fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business-to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud." free-market economics ethics Milton Friedman
7f8befe Consider, for example, language. It is a complex structure that is continually changing and developing. It has a well-defined order, yet no central body planned it. No one decided what words should be admitted into the language, what the rules of grammar should be, which words should be adjectives, which nouns. The French Academy does try to control changes in the French language, but that was a late development. It was established long aft.. Milton Friedman
c9f7824 We now know, as a few knew then, that the depression was not produced by a failure of private enterprise, but rather by a failure of government in an area in which the government had from the first been assigned responsibility---"To coin money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin," in the words of Section 8, Article 1, of the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, as we shall see in Chapter 9, government failure in managing money is .. Milton Friedman
a8b485b Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." --Justice Louis Brandeis," Milton Friedman
ab90249 Fundamentally, there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary co-operation of individuals - the technique of the market place. Milton Friedman
ddeffe5 So far as we know, no pollster has asked the public, "Are you getting your money's worth for the more than 40 percent of your income being spent on your behalf by government?" But" Milton Friedman
ce0e7c5 The majority does rule. But it is a rather special kind of majority. It consists of a coalition of special interest minorities. The way to get elected to Congress is to collect groups of, say, 2 or 3 percent of your constituents, each of which is strongly interested in one special issue that hardly concerns the rest of your constituents. Each group will be willing to vote for you if you promise to back its issue regardless of what you do ab.. Milton Friedman
c92220c Both the fragmentation of power and the conflicting government policies are rooted in the political realities of a democratic system that operates by enacting detailed and specific legislation. Such a system tends to give undue political power to small groups that have highly concentrated interests, to give greater weight to obvious, direct, and immediate effects of government action than to possibly more important but concealed, indirect, .. Milton Friedman
328c3c8 Five simple truths embody most of what we know about inflation: Inflation is a monetary phenomenon arising from a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output (though, of course, the reasons for the increase in money may be various). In today's world government determines--or can determine--the quantity of money. There is only one cure for inflation: a slower rate of increase in the quantity of money. It takes time--measured .. Milton Friedman
71c816e A fourth argument, one that was made by Alexander Hamilton and continues to be repeated down to the present, is that free trade would be fine if all other countries practiced free trade but that so long as they do not, the United States cannot afford to. This argument has no validity whatsoever, either in principle or in practice. Other countries that impose restrictions on international trade do hurt us. But they also hurt themselves. Asid.. Milton Friedman
6c9345d One reason inflation is so destructive is because some people benefit greatly while other people suffer; society is divided into winners and losers. The winners regard the good things that happen to them as the natural result of their own foresight, prudence, and initiative. They regard the bad things, the rise in the prices of the things they buy, as produced by forces outside their control. Almost everyone will say that he is against infl.. Milton Friedman
fba1849 To the despair of every economist, it seems almost impossible for most people other than trained economists to comprehend how a price system works. Reporters and TV commentators seem especially resistant to the elementary principles they supposedly imbibed in freshman economics. Second, Milton Friedman
31460fd No arbitrary obstacles should prevent people from achieving those positions for which their talents fit them and which their values lead them to seek. Not birth, nationality, color, religion, sex, nor any other irrelevant characteristic should determine the opportunities that are open to a person--only his abilities. Milton Friedman
099ba23 A common objection to totalitarian societies is that they regard the end as justifying the means. Taken literally, this objection is clearly illogical. If the end does not justify the means, what does? But this easy answer does not dispose of the objection; it simply shows that the objection is not well put. To deny that the end justifies the means is indirectly to assert that the end in question is not the ultimate end, that the ultimate e.. Milton Friedman
0be8a3d Nor do the spokesmen for these organizations ever explain why, if the public school system is doing such a splendid job, it needs to fear competition from nongovernmental, competitive schools or, if it isn't, why anyone should object to its "destruction." -- Milton Friedman
8895d3e Currently, the only widely available alternative to a local public school is a parochial school. Only churches have been in a position to subsidize schooling on a large scale and only subsidized schooling can compete with "free" schooling. (Try selling a product that someone else is giving away!) The voucher plan would produce a much wider range of alternatives--unless it was sabotaged by excessively rigid standards for "approval." The choi.. Milton Friedman
a5e923d The threat to public schools arises from their defects, not their accomplishments. In small, closely knit communities where public schools, particularly elementary schools, are now reasonably satisfactory, not even the most comprehensive voucher plan would have much effect. The public schools would remain dominant, perhaps somewhat improved by the threat of potential competition. But elsewhere, and particularly in the urban slums where the .. Milton Friedman
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