More Quotes by Milton Friedman
Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
When a man spends his own money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about how much he spends and how he spends it. When a man spends his own money to buy something for someone else, he is still very careful about how much he spends, but somewhat less what he spends it on. When a man spends someone else's money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about what he buys, but doesn't care at all how much he spends. And when a man spends someone else's money on someone else, he does't care how much he spends or what he spends it on. And that's government for you.
We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
Inflation is taxation without legislation.
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.
If capitalism worked as the socialists think an economic system ought to work, and provided a constant equality of living conditions for all, regardless of whether a man was able or not, resourceful or not, diligent or not, thrifty or not, if capitalism put no premiums on resourcefulness and effort and not penalty on idleness or vice, it would produce only an equality of destitution.
The government doesn't have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
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.
