Quote

It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.

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
Making
Else
Problem
Approve
Government
Hurts
May
Criminals
Something
Nobody
People
Hurt
Moral

More quotes by Milton Friedman

Image
The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can't do that.
Milton Friedman
Image
The state of our educational system is a disgrace to our country. We have an elementary and secondary school system in which close to half of the youngsters never graduate properly. It's a disgrace that there is more illiteracy today than there was 100 years ago.
Milton Friedman
Image
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.
Milton Friedman
Image
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.
Milton Friedman
Image
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.
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
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
Political leaders in capitalist countries who cheer the collapse of socialism in other countries continue to favor socialist solutions in their own. They know the words, but they have not learned the tune.
Milton Friedman
Image
Is there some society you know of that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed?
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
Every friend of freedom... must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.
Milton Friedman
Image
Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative -- the building blocks of success throughout our society.
Milton Friedman
Image
How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect? Freedom is a rare and delicate plant.
Milton Friedman
Image
The Founding Fathers envisioned a federal government that trusts its people with their money and freedom, outlining this limited, non-intrusive federal government in...the Constitution, leaving the other powers to people...or to the states.
Milton Friedman
Image
Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
Milton Friedman
Image
The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them.
Milton Friedman
Image
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
Image
Not all schooling is education nor all education, schooling.
Milton Friedman
Image
The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good.
Milton Friedman
Image
We have a freer world because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the changes in China. Those two have been the main contributors to freedom in our time.
Milton Friedman