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Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition.

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
Either
Wages
Causes
Statement
Nothing
Minimum
Every
Definition
Statements
Definitions
Economist
Investing
Inflation
Cause
Unemployment

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Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse - for both the addict and the rest of us.
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The argument for collectivism is simple free market is not.
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The price works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time.
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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.
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The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum for determining the rule of the game and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on.
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Richard Nixon was a very intelligent and able man. And he had the right ideas. But he did not have the adherence to principles that [Ronald] Reagan had. He did some very good things. We owe to Richard Nixon the volunteer army - he got rid of the draft. And that was a major increase in freedom.
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There's no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn't exist.
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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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Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself ... Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.
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Germany cannot get out of the euro. What it has to do, therefore, is make the economy more flexible - to eliminate the restrictions on prices, on wages and on employment in short, the regulations that keep 10 percent of the German workforce unemployed.
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My interest in political philosophy was rather casual until I met Hayek.
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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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When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
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I think in some ways it would make more sense to have as a poverty level a relative concept and say, the level of poverty is that level of income or that level of consumption below which 10 percent of the people now are.
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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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Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative -- the building blocks of success throughout our society.
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George Stigler was a delightful correspondent. In a letter from London in 1948, after remarking on the inconvertibility of the pound and the inedible, still-rationed food, he concluded, So here I am losing weight and gaining pounds.
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Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold.
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On aging societies, there is no reason why a country that has a lot of old people can't be prosperous if, during their working lives, individuals provide for their retirement.
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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
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