More Quotes by Milton Friedman
A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.
The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
A society that puts equality — in the sense of equality of outcome — ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.
When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
What makes it [economics] most fascinating is that its fundamental principles are so simple that they can be written on one page, that anyone can understand them, and yet very few do.
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
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.
Inflation is taxation without legislation.
