“We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.”
“In the past century a myth has grown up that free market capitalism—equality of opportunity as we have interpreted that term—increases such inequalities, that it is a system under which the rich exploit the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wherever the free market has been permitted to operate, wherever anything approaching equality of opportunity has existed, the ordinary man has been able to attain levels of living never dreamed of before. Nowhere is the gap between rich and poor wider, nowhere are the rich richer and the poor poorer, than in those societies that do not permit the free market to operate.”
Source: Free to Choose (1980), Ch. 5 “Created Equal”, p. 146
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Milton Friedman 158
American economist, statistician, and writer 1912–2006Related quotes
Source: Democracy for the Few (2010 [1974]), sixth edition, Chapter 6, p. 81
Source: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008), Ch. 2, Learning the right lessons from history, p. 61
Context: Rich countries have 'kicked away the ladder' by forcing free-market, free-trade policies on poor countries. Already established countries do not want more competitors emerging through the nationalistic policies they themselves successfully used in the past.
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (2007), Chapter 4.
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (2007)
“The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.”
Source: 1930s, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935), Ch. 1: In Praise of Idleness
Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. xvii
"State Capitalism Comes of Age," http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64948/ian-bremmer/state-capitalism-comes-of-age Foreign Affairs (May/June 2009).
“Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.”
Attributed
Profit Over People (1999).
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999
Context: The "corporatization of America" during the past century has been an attack on democracy—and on markets, part of the shift from something resembling "capitalism" to the highly administered markets of the modern state/corporate era. A current variant is called "minimizing the state," that is, transferring decision-making power from the public arena to somewhere else: "to the people" in the rhetoric of power; to private tyrannies, in the real world.