Milton Friedman Quotes About Politics
-
There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.
→ -
When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union - like public housing in the United States - look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.
→ -
Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
→ -
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
→ -
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
→ -
If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven't cut taxes enough.
→ -
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
→ -
A crackpot theory. Instead of saying labor's exploited, as Marx did, Kelso says capital's exploited. It's worse than Marx. It's Marx stood on its head.
→ -
I cannot disagree with you that having something like 500 economists is extremely unhealthy. As you say, it is not conducive to independent, objective research. You and I know there has been censorship of the material published. Equally important, the location of the economists in the Federal Reserve has had a significant influence on the kind of research they do, biasing that research toward noncontroversial technical papers on method as opposed to substantive papers on policy and results
→ -
I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintainence of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to do something about them you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tenticles and get bad results elsewhere.
→ -
The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.
→ -
Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
→ -
Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
→ -
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
→
Related Authors
-
Paul Samuelson Economist -
David D. Friedman Economist -
Adam Smith Philosopher -
George Stigler Economist -
Thomas Friedman Journalist -
Murray Rothbard Economist -
Karl Marx Philosopher -
Friedrich August von Hayek Economist -
Alan Greenspan Economist -
Gary Becker Economist -
John Kenneth Galbraith Economist -
John Maynard Keynes Economist -
Thomas Sowell Economist -
Margaret Thatcher Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom -
Irving Fisher Economist -
Ludwig von Mises Philosopher -
Paul Krugman Economist -
Frederic Bastiat Economist -
Ayn Rand Novelist