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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

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Milton Friedman
Age: 94 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 31
Died: 2006
Died: November 16
Economist
Essayist
Statistician
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Milton Fridman
People
Getting
Freedom
Free
Enabling
Black
Controls
Around
Opening
Government
Economics
Work
Market
Way
Economy

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In a bureaucratic system, useless work drives out useful work.
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I know of no severe depression, in any country or any time, that was not accompanied by a sharp decline in the stock of money, and equally of no sharp decline in the stock of money that was not accompanied by a severe depression.
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It doesn't worry me a bit that China and Japan hold so much US debt. In a way, it seems foolish for them to do it because they get lower returns than they might elsewhere. But that is their business.
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The euro is going to be a big source of problems, not a source of help.
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There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.
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The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash, a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B, without A knowing B or B knowing A.
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The Great Depression was not a sign of the failure of monetary policy or a result of the failure of the market system as was widely interpreted. It was instead a consequence of a very serious government failure, in particular a failure in the monetary authorities to do what they'd initially been set up to do.
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To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.
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A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.
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If you look at the balance sheet, the US is heavily in debt. If you look at the income account - the amount of interest the US pays abroad - it is almost exactly equal to the amount of interest that it receives from abroad. American assets held abroad are earning a higher rate of return than foreign assets held here.
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Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.
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How can thinking people believe that a government that cannot deliver the mail can deliver gas better than Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, and the rest?
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Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
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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.
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Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.
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I am a limited-government libertarian.
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We measure poverty by what I believe is a very, very crude concept. We actually measure poverty by trying to get some kind of an estimate of the minimum expenditures on food that are required to maintain health, multiplying that number by three, and saying that's the level of poverty. And it's a very crude, inaccurate arrangement.
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If a country is an attractive place for foreigners to invest their funds, then that country will have a relatively high exchange rate. If it's an unattractive place, it will have a relatively low exchange rate. Those are the fundamentals that determine the exchange rate in a floating exchange rate system.
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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.
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Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.
Milton Friedman