Category: Milton Friedman

The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a, from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way.

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

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

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

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

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

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