Milton Friedman quotes

 Here are some quotes from one of the world's greatest economists.

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

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

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

The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.

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.

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

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

The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, antiblack laws on the statute books.

After the fall of communism, everybody in the world agreed that socialism was a failure. Everybody in the world, more or less, agreed that capitalism was a success. And every capitalist country in the world apparently deduced from that what the West needed was more socialism.