35 Inspirational Milton Friedman Quotes On Success

Milton Friedman was an American economist who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr. Friedman’s challenges to what he later called “naive Keynesian theory” began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function. During the 1960s he became the main advocate opposing Keynesian government policies, and described his approach (along with mainstream economics) as using “Keynesian language and apparatus” yet rejecting its initial conclusions. He theorized that there existed a natural rate of unemployment and argued that unemployment below this rate would cause inflation to accelerate. He argued that the Phillips curve was in the long run vertical at the ‘natural rate’ and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation. Friedman promoted an alternative macroeconomic viewpoint known as ‘monetarism’ and argued that a steady, small expansion of the money supply was the preferred policy. His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve’s response to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. May these Milton Friedman Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.

1. “Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.” Milton Friedman

2. “You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.” Milton Friedman

3. “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.” Milton Friedman

4. “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.” Milton Friedman

5. “The government doesn’t have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.” Milton Friedman

6. “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.” Milton Friedman

7. “Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.” Milton Friedman

8. “You know there are very few Marxists left in the world, they’re all in American universities.” Milton Friedman

9. “If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don’t be surprised if you get unemployment.” Milton Friedman

10. “The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits.” Milton Friedman

11. “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.” Milton Friedman

12. “The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.” Milton Friedman

13. “I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.” Milton Friedman

14. “Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.” Milton Friedman

15. “The essential notion of a capitalist society, is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.” Milton Friedman

16. “A free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.” Milton Friedman

17. “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” Milton Friedman

18. “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” Milton Friedman

19. “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.” Milton Friedman

20. “Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.” Milton Friedman

21. “Why have we had such a decline in moral climate? I submit to you that a major factor has been a change in the philosophy which has been dominant, a change from belief in individual responsibility to belief in social responsibility. If you adopt the view that a man is not responsible for his own behavior, that somehow society is responsible, why should he seek to make his behavior good?” Milton Friedman

22. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Milton Friedman

23. “You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.” Milton Friedman

24. “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.” Milton Friedman

25. “I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or it they try, they will shortly be out of office.” Milton Friedman

26. “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.” Milton Friedman

27. “How did we make the transition from using wood to using coal, from using coal to using oil, from using oil to using natural gas? How in God’s name did we make that transition without a Federal Energy Agency?” Milton Friedman

28. “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 doesn’t care how much he spends or what he spends it on. And that’s government for you.” Milton Friedman

29. “Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.” Milton Friedman

30. “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.” Milton Friedman

31. “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.” Milton Friedman

32. “The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power – we must have a dispersion of power.” Milton Friedman

33. “The only reason there is a crisis about Social Security in the US and pensions in Europe and Japan is that you cannot maintain a “Ponzi” scheme indefinitely. We have collected from today’s young to pay today’s old and counted on tomorrow’s young to keep doing so. That was a fine scheme as long as the number of young people was rising faster than old people. When that ratio comes to an end, such a system also has to end.” Milton Friedman

34. “There’s no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn’t exist.” Milton Friedman

35. “Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government– in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.” Milton Friedman

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