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
Government power must be dispersed. If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington. If I do not like what my local community does, be it in sewage disposal, or zoning, or schools, I can move to another local community, and though few may take this step, the mere possibility acts as a check. If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations.
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
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 plan.
World trade depends on differences among countries, not similarities. Different countries are in different stages of development. It is appropriate for them to have different patterns, different policies for ecology, labor standards, and so forth.
So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.
When they so-called 'target the interest rate', what they're doing is controlling the money supply via the interest rate. The interest rate is only an intermediary instrument.
Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.
There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.
The Great Depression was not a sign of the failure of monetary policy or a result of the failure of the market system as was widely interpreted. It was instead a consequence of a very serious government failure, in particular a failure in the monetary authorities to do what they'd initially been set up to do.
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.
I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.