Milton Friedman was born in New York in 1912 and died in San Francisco in 2006 at the age of 94.
Friedman was an American economist, statistician, and writer who profoundly influenced the research agenda of the economics profession. He was ranked as the second most popular economist of the twentieth century after John Maynard Keynes, and was described as “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century.
Milton Friedman didn’t trust governments, especially “Big Government” and the quotes selected attest to that.
During the 1960’s, he famously promoted an alternative macroeconomic policy known as “monetarism,” and argued that a steady, small expansion of the money supply was the only wise policy.
Friedman was an economic adviser to Republican U.S. President Ronald Reagan. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal intervention and was taken on board by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as the cornerstone of her own economic policy.
Checkout Milton Friedman’s quotes for yourself and you’ll understand him better:
- Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
- If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.
- Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
- I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.
- Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
- The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
- Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
- We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
- There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
- Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
- Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
- Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
- The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.
- 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.
- History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
As you see from these quotes, Milton Friedman was not a great believer in the ability of governments to actually govern.
Do you agree with him? If not, why not?
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