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“The average income of blacks here is far higher than the average income of all the people in the Soviet Union. The official government definition of the poverty line in the U. S. is higher than the average income in the Soviet Union; it’s higher than the income received by 90 percent of the people on the world’s surface. Now, that doesn’t mean blacks aren’t subject to injustice; of course they are.”

Milton Friedman

“Interview with Milton Friedman”, Playboy magazine (Feb. 1973)

“Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn’t really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it and doesn’t just talk about it, he wants to have the right amount of pollution. We can’t really afford to eliminate it—not without abandoning all the benefits of technology that we not only enjoy but on which we depend. So the answer is to allow only pollution that’s worth what it costs, and not any pollution that isn’t worth what it costs.”

Milton Friedman

“Interview with Milton Friedman”, Playboy magazine (Feb. 1973)

“The essence of the problem is that once we begin to allow exceptions for special interests, we move from a system of private arrangements to a political system where everyone’s freedom is limited and government becomes a matter of trying to balance those interests. Nobody really wins under these terms.”

Milton Friedman

“Interview with Milton Friedman”, Playboy magazine (Feb. 1973)

“We want the kind of world in which greedy people can do the least harm to their fellow men. That’s the kind of world in which power is widely dispersed and each of us has as many alternatives as possible.”

Milton Friedman

“Interview with Milton Friedman”, Playboy magazine (Feb. 1973)

“What kind of society isn’t structured on greed?… So the problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm. It seems to me that the great virtue of capitalism is that it’s that kind of system. Because under capitalism, the power of any one individual over his fellow man is relatively small.”

Milton Friedman

“Interview with Milton Friedman”, Playboy magazine (Feb. 1973)

“The draft is inequitable because irrelevant considerations play so large a role in determining who serves. It is wasteful because deferment of students, fathers, and married men jams colleges, raises the birth rate, and fuels divorce court. It is inconsistent with a free society because it exacts compulsory service from some and limits the freedom of others to travel abroad, emigrate, or even to talk and act freely. So long as compulsion is retained, these defects are inevitable.”

Milton Friedman

Source: An Economist's Protest: Columns in Political Economy (1966), p. 189 (1975 edition)

“The old saw is that the Quakers went to the New World to do good and ended up doing well. Today, well-meaning reformers go to Washington to do good and end up doing harm.”

Milton Friedman

Source: An Economist's Protest: Columns in Political Economy (1966), p. 155

“A military draft is undesirable and unnecessary. We can and should man our armed forces with volunteers—as the United States has traditionally done except in major wars.”

Milton Friedman

Source: An Economist's Protest: Columns in Political Economy (1966), p. 121

“Those of us who believe in freedom must believe also in the freedom of individuals to make their own mistakes. If a man knowingly prefers to live for today, to use his resources for current enjoyment, deliberately choosing a penurious old age, by what right do we prevent him from doing so? We may argue with him, seek to persuade him that he is wrong, but are we entitled to use coercion to prevent him from doing what he chooses to do? Is there not always the possibility that he is right and that we are wrong? Humility is the distinguishing virtue of the believer in freedom; arrogance, of the paternalist.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Source: Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Ch. 11, Social Welfare Measures, p. 187

“Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine. If businessmen do have a social responsibility other than making maximum profits for stockholders, how are they to know what it is? Can self-selected private individuals decide what the social interest is? Can they decide how great a burden they are justified in placing on themselves or their stockholders to serve that social interest?”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Source: Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Ch. 8 Monopoly and the Social Responsibility of Business and Labor, p. 133

“Exchange is truly voluntary only when nearly equivalent alternatives exist. Monopoly implies the absence of alternatives and thereby inhibits effective freedom of exchange.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Source: Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Ch. 2, The Role of Government in a Free Society, p. 28

“Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated — a system of checks and balances.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Source: Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Ch. 1 The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom, p. 15

“The nineteenth-century liberal regarded an extension of freedom as the most effective way to promote welfare and equality; the twentieth-century liberal regards welfare and equality as either prerequisites of or alternatives to freedom.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Introduction, p. 5
Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

“As it developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the intellectual movement that went under the name of liberalism emphasized freedom as the ultimate goal and the individual as the ultimate entity in the society. It supported laissez faire at home as a means of reducing the role of the state in economic affairs and thereby enlarging the role of the individual; it supported free trade abroad as a means of linking the nations of the world together peacefully and democratically. In political matters, it supported the development of representative government and of parliamentary institutions, reduction in the arbitrary power of the state, and protection of the civil freedoms of individuals.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Introduction, p. 5
Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

“By relying primarily on voluntary co-operation and private enterprise, in both economic and other activities, we can insure that the private sector is a check on the powers of the governmental sector and an effective protection of freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Introduction, p. 3
Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

“The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Introduction, p. 3
Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

“The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. … Government can never duplicate the variety and diversity of individual action.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Introduction, pp. 2-3
Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

“The Chilean economy did very well, but more important, in the end the central government, the military junta, was replaced by a democratic society. So the really important thing about the Chilean business is that free markets did work their way in bringing about a free society.”

Milton Friedman

“Commanding Heights, Interview on PBS” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/int_miltonfriedman.html, (Oct. 1, 2000)

“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.”

Milton Friedman

PBS “Interview: On freedom and free markets” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/int_miltonfriedman.html Commanding Heights series (Oct. 1, 2000)

“Thank heaven that we don’t get all of the government that we are made to pay for.”

Milton Friedman

Quoted in the House of Lords, (Nov. 24, 1994), also in Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotes, Third Edition, Elizabeth Knowles, edit., Oxford University Press (2007) p. 124