More Quotes by Milton Friedman
The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.
A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas.
Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.
When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union - like public housing in the United States - look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.
