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Milton Friedman citations
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Milton Friedman est un économiste américain né le 31 juillet 1912 à Brooklyn et mort le 16 novembre 2006 à San Francisco, considéré comme l'un des économistes les plus influents du XXe siècle. Il obtient le prix Nobel d'économie en 1976 pour ses travaux sur « l'analyse de la consommation, l'histoire monétaire et la démonstration de la complexité des politiques de stabilisation », il a été un ardent défenseur du libéralisme. Il a travaillé sur des domaines de recherche aussi bien théorique qu'appliquée, il fut à l'origine du courant monétariste ainsi que le fondateur de l'École de Chicago. Il est également un commentateur politique et essayiste à succès,.

Deux de ses œuvres ont particulièrement touché le grand public : d'abord son livre Capitalisme et liberté publié en 1962 puis sa série d'interventions télévisées réalisées en 1980 intitulée Free to Choose . Dans Capitalisme et liberté, il explique sa théorie selon laquelle la réduction du rôle de l'État dans une économie de marché est le seul moyen d'atteindre la liberté politique et économique. Plus tard, dans La Liberté du choix, Friedman cherche à démontrer la supériorité du libéralisme économique sur les autres systèmes économiques.

Milton Friedman a inauguré une pensée économique d'inspiration libérale dont les prescriptions s'opposent de front à celle du keynésianisme. En réponse à la fonction de consommation keynésienne, il développa la théorie du revenu permanent. Avec cette théorie et l'introduction du taux de chômage naturel, Friedman remet en cause le bien-fondé des politiques de relance qui, pour lui, ne peuvent que provoquer de l'inflation contre laquelle il faut lutter. À cette fin, il proposa l'instauration d'un taux constant de croissance de la masse monétaire. Enfin, il réalise un apport important au droit de la concurrence moderne, « chaque décision de l'Autorité de la concurrence, des Cours d'appel ou de la Commission européenne mettant indirectement en balance ses idées ».

Ses idées se diffusèrent progressivement et furent prises en compte par les milieux politiques dans les années 1980, influençant profondément les mouvements conservateurs et libertariens américains. Ses idées sur le monétarisme, la fiscalité, les privatisations et la dérèglementation ont directement ou indirectement inspiré les politiques économiques de nombreux gouvernements à travers le monde, notamment ceux de Ronald Reagan aux États-Unis, de Margaret Thatcher au Royaume-Uni, d'Augusto Pinochet au Chili, de Mart Laar en Estonie, de Davíð Oddsson en Islande et de Brian Mulroney au Canada. Wikipedia  

✵ 31. juillet 1912 – 16. novembre 2006
Milton Friedman photo
Milton Friedman: 171 citations0 J'aime

Milton Friedman citations célèbres

“L'existence d'un marché libre n'élimine évidemment pas le besoin de gouvernement. Au contraire, le gouvernement est essentiel, à la fois comme forum pour déterminer les « règles du jeu » et comme arbitre pour interpréter et faire respecter les règles qui ont été adoptées.”

Milton Friedman livre Capitalisme et liberté

The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum for determining the "rule of the game" and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on.
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Capitalisme et liberté, 1962

“Le fond du problème posé par la plupart des critiques de la publicité n'est pas le fait que la publicité manipule les goûts mais le fait que le grand public a des goûts détestables — c'est-à-dire différents des goûts des critiques.”

Milton Friedman

La Liberté du choix, 1980

“L'inflation est une maladie dangereuse et parfois fatale”

Milton Friedman

La Liberté du choix, 1980

“La concurrence du marché, quand on la laisse fonctionner, protège le consommateur mieux que tous les mécanismes gouvernementaux venus successivement se superposer au marché”

Milton Friedman

La Liberté du choix, 1980

“La Réserve Féderale a sans aucun doute causé la Grande Dépression en contractant le volume de l'argent en circulation d'un tiers entre 1929 et 1933.”

Milton Friedman

The Federal Reserve definitely caused the Great Depression by contracting the amount of money in circulation by one-third from 1929 to 1933
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Émissions, Interview radio

“Une des plus grandes erreurs est de juger une politique sur ses intentions et non sur ses résultats.”

Milton Friedman

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results
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Émissions, The Open Mind

“Les grandes avancées de la civilisation, que ce soit dans l'architecture ou dans la peinture, la science ou la littérature, l'industrie ou l'agriculture, ne sont jamais nées de l'intervention d'un gouvernement centralisé.”

Milton Friedman livre Capitalisme et liberté

The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
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Capitalisme et liberté, 1962

“Aucune raison ne peut justifier les monopoles d'État sur la poste et l'interdiction faite à n'importe qui d'autre de porter le courrier.”

Milton Friedman

Citations sur la liberté de Milton Friedman

“L'histoire suggère uniquement que le capitalisme est une condition nécessaire à la liberté politique. Clairement ce n'est pas une condition suffisante.”

Milton Friedman livre Capitalisme et liberté

History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
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Capitalisme et liberté, 1962

“Une société qui met l'égalité au dessus de la liberté n'aura ni l'un, ni l'autre. Une société qui met la liberté au dessus de l'égalité aura beaucoup des deux.”

Milton Friedman

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both
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Émissions, Free to choose (émission télévisée)

“Une société qui place l'égalité avant la liberté finira par n'avoir ni égalité ni liberté. [.. ] Une société qui place la liberté avant toutes choses finira par obtenir, sans l'avoir cherché, davantage d'égalité en même temps que davantage de liberté”

Milton Friedman

La Liberté du choix, 1980

“Il existe une contradiction fondamentale entre l’idéal des « parts équitables » (ou l'idéal dont il dérive : « A chacun selon ses besoins ») et l’idéal de la liberté personnelle. Et cette contradiction a été la plaie de toute tentative de placer l'égalité des résultats comme principe de base de l'organisation sociale. Cela a abouti invariablement à un état de terreur : la Russieur, la Chine et plus récemment le Cambodge en offrent des preuves évidentes et convaincantes”

Milton Friedman

La Liberté du choix, 1980

“La crainte des contrôles fiscaux, l'étouffement bureaucratique et le harcèlement de l'État constituent des armes puissantes contre la liberté de parole.”

Milton Friedman

La Liberté du choix, 1980

Milton Friedman: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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Milton Friedman livre Capitalisme et liberté

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?”

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Milton Friedman livre Capitalisme et liberté

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.”

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Milton Friedman livre Capitalisme et liberté

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.”

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Milton Friedman livre Capitalisme et liberté

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.”

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Milton Friedman livre Capitalisme et liberté

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.”

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Milton Friedman livre Capitalisme et liberté

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.”

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Milton Friedman livre Capitalisme et liberté

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.”

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Milton Friedman livre Capitalisme et liberté

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.”

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Milton Friedman livre Capitalisme et liberté

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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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

“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.”

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Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman: The Rise of Socialism is Absurd and There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKhfR8WC4Eo, Grand opening speech at Cato Institutes’ headquarters in Washington, D.C. (May 1993)

“The most unresolved problem of the day is precisely the problem that concerned the founders of this nation: how to limit the scope and power of government. Tyranny, restrictions on human freedom, come primarily from governmental restrictions that we ourselves have set up.”

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Milton Friedman

” “Interview with Milton Friedman” https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/interview-with-milton-friedman, David Levy, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (June 1, 1992)

“You can only aim at equality by giving some people the right to take things from others. And what ultimately happens when you aim for equality is that A and B decide what C should do for D, except that they take a bit of commission off on the way.”

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Milton Friedman

“Milton Friedman vs Free Lunch Advocate” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qe7fLL25AQ (1980s)

“In my opinion, a society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. A society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed.”

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Milton Friedman

“Milton Friedman vs Free Lunch Advocate” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qe7fLL25AQ (1980s)

“If you look at every program that the government has adopted in the direction of extending its scope, it took an enormous propaganda campaign by special propaganda groups to get those measures passed. There was no underlining public demand for those measures. On the contrary, the demand had to be created, it had to be developed, it had to be produced. And it was created, it was developed, it was produced, by people… who sincerely wanted to see an expansion in the scope of government.”

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Milton Friedman

“The Social Security Myth” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCdgv7n9xCY&t=124s (1980s)

“Will we read next that government control of prices has created a shortage of sand in the Sahara?”

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Milton Friedman

“Things That Ain’t So by Milton Friedman”, Newsweek (March 10, 1980) p. 79

“That is a widespread myth, that it is possible to spend money with nobody paying for it. You have everybody screaming that we ought to have new, bigger, more generous government programs. Where are we going to raise the money? Tax business. But business corporations can’t pay any taxes. A corporate executive may sign the check, but where does he get the money? From his stockholders or from his customers or from his employees. Unlike the federal government, he doesn’t have a printing press in his basement. So the only way he can pay money to the government is imposing a burden on somebody. Government cannot spend money at nobody’s expense.”

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Milton Friedman

“Economic Myths and Public Opinion” https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collections/2016c21/AmSpectator_01_1976.pdf, The Alternative: An American Spectator, vol. 9, no. 4, (January 1976) pp. 5-9

“This leads to my next myth—the myth that government can spend money at nobody’s expense. What was really involved in that last story was that somehow the local people do not pay out the money coming down from Washington somebody else does. Of course, the truth is that the money makes a round trip between Florida and Washington, and there is a discount taken off for cash as it passes through Washington. Some of you may remember that wonderful description of government by the French economist, Frederic Bastiat, who said that government is that fiction whereby everybody believes that he can live at the expense of everybody else.”

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Milton Friedman

“Economic Myths and Public Opinion” https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collections/2016c21/AmSpectator_01_1976.pdf, The Alternative: An American Spectator, vol. 9, no. 4, (January 1976) pp. 5-9

“The elementary truth is that the Great Depression was produced by government mismanagement. It was not produced by the failure of private enterprise, it was produced by the failure of government to perform a function which had been assigned to it.”

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Milton Friedman

" Economic Myths and Public Opinion https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collections/2016c21/AmSpectator_01_1976.pdf” The Alternative: An American Spectator vol. 9, no. 4, (January 1976) pp. 5-9, Reprinted in Bright Promises, Dismal Performance: An Economist’s Protest, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1983) pp. 60-75

“I have been impressed time and again by the schizophrenic character of many businessmen. They are capable of being extremely far‐sighted and clear‐headed in matters that are internal to their businesses. They are incredibly short sighted and muddle‐headed in mat ters [sic!] that are outside their businesses but affect the possible survival of business in general. This short sightedness is strikingly exemplified in the calls from many businessmen for wage and price guidelines or controls or incomes policies. There is nothing that could do more in a brief period to destroy a market system and replace it by a centrally controlled system than effective governmental control of prices and wages. The short‐sightedness is also exemplified in speeches by business men on social responsibility. This may gain them kudos in the short run. But it helps to strengthen the already too prevalent view that the ptirsuit [sic!] of profits is wicked and im moral [sic!] and must be curbed and controlled by external forces. Once this view is adopted, the external forces that curb the market will not be the social consciences, however highly developed, of the pontificating executives; it will be the iron fist of Government bureaucrats. Here, as with price and wage controls, business men seem to me to reveal a suicidal impulse.”

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Milton Friedman

“A Friedman doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” (Sept. 1970)

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