Milton Friedman – University of Chicago School of Economics Professor

As I read the comments by Milton Friedman, I can’t help but think about how his words relate so much to today’s economic and political issues.

“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.”

See Video: Friedman Explains Spending

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

“The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that’s why it’s so essential to preserving individual freedom.”

“The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.”

“My major problem with the world is a problem of scarcity in the midst of plenty … of people starving while there are unused resources … people having skills which are not being used.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Governments never learn. Only people learn.”

“Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.”

“The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.”

“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.”

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

“We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.”

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

“Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.”