More Quotes by Milton Friedman
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.
You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.
If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don't be surprised if you get unemployment.
Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.
The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
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.
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.
Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
