More Quotes by Milton Friedman
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.
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
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.
Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.
Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised.
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.
When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.
