Quote

Complete free trade is not politically feasible. Why? Because it's only in the general interest and in no one's special interest.

Milton Friedman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
General
Special
Interest
Free
Feasible
Politically
Complete
Trade

More quotes by Milton Friedman

Image
And where are you going to get these angels who are going to run society for us?
Milton Friedman
Image
Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.
Milton Friedman
Image
The fall of the Berlin Wall really demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was a bad system, and what subsequently happened in the Soviet Union, that that system was a failure.
Milton Friedman
Image
You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.
Milton Friedman
Image
Statistics do not speak for themselves.
Milton Friedman
Image
The long-range sloution to high unemployment is to increase the incentive for ordinary people to save, invest, work, and employ others. We make it costly for employers to employ people we subsidize people not to go to work We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
Milton Friedman
Image
I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government.
Milton Friedman
Image
So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free-enterprise system.
Milton Friedman
Image
I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they’re responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of.
Milton Friedman
Image
The future of private enterprise capitalism is also the future of a free society. There is no possibility of having a politically free society unless the major part of its economic resources are operated under a capitalistic private enterprise system.
Milton Friedman
Image
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
Image
Saying it is one thing. Doing it is very different.
Milton Friedman
Image
In the current world, with the skills needed, dropouts [like no secondary education] are condemned to being members of the underclass. In my view, this is a fault of the American school system, which is a government monopoly.
Milton Friedman
Image
Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist.
Milton Friedman
Image
I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible. ... because I believe the big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending.
Milton Friedman
Image
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
Image
There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.
Milton Friedman
Image
Had drugs been decriminalized, crack would never have been invented and there would today be fewer addicts... The ghettos would not be drug-and-crime-infested no-man's lands... Colombia, Bolivia and Peru would not be suffering from narco-terror, and we would not be distorting our foreign policy because of it.
Milton Friedman
Image
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.
Milton Friedman
Image
Not all schooling is education nor all education, schooling.
Milton Friedman