Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman
Milton Friedmanwas an American economist who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the second generation of Chicago price theory, a methodological movement at the University of Chicago's Department of Economics, Law School, and Graduate School of Business from the 1940s onward. Several students and young professors that were recruited...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth31 July 1912
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
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.
The preservation of liberty, not the promotion of efficiency, is the primary justification for private property. Efficiency is a happy, though not accidental, by-product - and a most important by-product because liberty could not have survived if it had not also produced affluence.
The price works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time.
Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.
The Soviet experience was much worse than experts in the West had thought. That discovery had a tremendous impact both on the intellectual community and on the public at large.
How did we make the transition from using wood to using coal, from using coal to using oil, from using oil to using natural gas? How in God's name did we make that transition without a Federal Energy Agency?
If you spend your own money on yourself, you care how much you spend and how well you spend it. If you spend your own money on someone else, you care how much you spend, but you don't care how well it is spent. If you spend someone else's money on yourself, you don't care how much you spend, but you do care how well it is spent. And finally, if you spend someone else's money on someone else, you don't care how much you spend, and you don't care how well it is spent. That is government.
The euro is good for Europe. But only if there is flexibility all around.
Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition.
...theories should be judged by their ability to predict events rather than by the realism of their assumptions.
John Lott documents how far 'politically correct' vested interests are willing to go to denigrate anyone who dares disagree with them. Lott has done us all a service by his thorough, thoughtful scholarly approach to a highly controversial issue.
What you have as a result of past policies is that German entrepreneurs go outside of Germany for many of their activities. They are investing abroad instead of at home because there isn't the openness, fluidity and opportunity they find outside their borders.
When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.