Milton Friedman

Thank heavens we do not get all of the government that we are made to pay for.

There is one and only one social responsibility of business-to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

A society that puts equality... ahead of freedom will end up with neither.

There is no free lunch.

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.

The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual.

Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.

I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.

To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.

With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.

Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. … And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold.

There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.

I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

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.

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

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 only gain at the expense of another.

It is because it’s prohibited. See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That’s literally true.

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom .

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

There is an invisible hand in politics that operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market. In politics, individuals who seek to promote only the public good are led by an invisible hand to promote special interests that it was no part of their intention to promote.