552 Quotes by Milton Friedman

Children are responsible individuals in embryo. They have ultimate rights of their own and are not simply the playthings of their parents.

Hong Kong is the bellwether. If the Chinese stick to their agreement to let Hong Kong go its own path, then China will also go that way. If they don’t, that is a very bad sign. I’m optimistic.

On the contrary, the inflation itself is partly a response to the reaction. As it has become politically less attractive to vote higher taxes to pay for higher spending, legislators have resorted to financing spending through inflation, a hidden tax that can be imposed without having been voted, taxation without representation. That is no more popular in the twentieth century than it was in the eighteenth.

I’d like to promote lots of things. I’d like to promote elimination of drug prohibition. I’d like to promote parental choice in education through vouchers. Those are two things I think are very urgent and important. They’re both more important than the harm which Social Security will do.

The major way that society has come to agree on the rules of property is through the growth of common law, though more recently legislation has played an increasing role.

John Lott documents how far ‘politically correct’ vested interests are willing to go to denigrate anyone who dares disagree with them. Lott has done us all a service by his thorough, thoughtful scholarly approach to a highly controversial issue.

In fiscal policy as in monetary policy, all political considerations aside, we simply do not know enough to be able to use deliberate changes in taxation or expenditures as a sensitive stabilizing mechanism.

A very different meaning of equality has emerged in the United States in recent decades – equality of outcome. Everyone should have the same level of living or of income, should finish the race at the same time. Equality of outcome is in clear conflict with liberty. The attempt to promote it has been a major source of bigger and bigger government, and of government-imposed restrictions on our liberty.

The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that’s why it’s so essential to preserving individual freedom.