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Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgment...In short, positive economics is or can be an objective science.

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
Judgment
Short
Normative
Positive
Objective
Position
Ethical
Principles
Objectives
Particular
Economics
Science
Principle
Independent

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The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
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Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.
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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.
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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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What's the difference? How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There's a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not?
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Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
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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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One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
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Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised.
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A private enterprise system needs some measuring rod, it needs something, it needs money to make its transactions. You can't run a big complicated system through barter, through converting one commodity into another. You need a monetary system to operate. And the instability in that monetary system is devastating to the performance of the economy.
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Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.
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One man's opportunism is another man's statesmanship.
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I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.
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To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a monetary union, putting out a fiat currency, composed of independent states.
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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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Saying it is one thing. Doing it is very different.
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There's no way to avoid a burden on your freedom. The costs themselves are a burden on your freedom. The restrictions that are necessary in order to get rid of the terrorists are a burden to your freedom. So there's no way in the short run to avoid a restriction on your freedom.
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Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.
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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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There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.
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