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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.

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
Doesn
Foolish
Seems
Debt
Might
China
Much
Return
Way
Hold
Returns
Bits
Elsewhere
Worry
Lower
Business
Japan

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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 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.
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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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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.
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Statistics do not speak for themselves.
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The invisible hand in politics operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market.
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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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My interest in political philosophy was rather casual until I met Hayek.
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History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
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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.
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Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.
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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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When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
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A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
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The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
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The most unresolved problem of the day is precisely the problem that concerned the founders of this nation: how to limit the scope and power of government. Tyranny, restrictions on human freedom, come primarily from governmental restrictions that we ourselves have set up.
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