Happy Birthday Milton!
Happy birthday, Milton!
The Nobel economist—and arch-monetarist—the late Milton Friedman, was born on this day in 1912. I was going to write a short biography. But there is one in both of the books that I wrote about him, and it’s not difficult to find all that stuff online.
So I will just say that he was a hugely likeable guy, who relished arguments both with friends and foes, as you could tell by the wide grin he always had while arguing. He would treat students just the same as professional economists, always being keen to engage with them and not talking down to them at all but taking their arguments seriously and trying to raise points they might not have considered. Madsen Pirie and I agree that, while F A Hayek was probably the wisest person we’ve ever met, Friedman was the sharpest—with a quick wit and instant, pithy responses to every point.
So rather than go on about his achievements, let me just let him speak in his own words.
[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.
Phil Donohue interview
The actual outcome of almost all programs that are sold in the name of helping the poor—and not only the minimum-wage rate—is to make the poor worse off.
Playboy interview
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
From Created Equal, the last of the Free to Choose television series (1990, Volume 5 transcript).
Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.
As quoted in If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren't There More Happy People? (2009) by John Mitchinson, p. 8
Ask yourself what products are currently least satisfactory and have shown the least improvement over time… The shoddy products are all produced by government or government-regulated industries. The outstanding products are all produced by private enterprise with little or no government involvement.
Milton & Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, Chapter 7
I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.
Interview with Richard Heffner on The Open Mind (7 December 1975)
A little inflation will provide a boost at first – like a small dose of a drug for a new addict – but then it takes more and more inflation to provide the boost, just as it takes a bigger and bigger dose of a drug to give a hardened addict a high.
Tyranny of the Status Quo, p.88
If all we want are jobs, we can create any number – for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks…. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs – jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume.
Milton & Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, Chapter 2
Few measures that we could take would do more to promote the cause of freedom at home and abroad than complete free trade.
Milton & Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, Ch 2.
Governments never learn. Only people learn.
Statement made in 1980, as quoted in The Cynic's Lexicon : A Dictionary Of Amoral Advice (1984), by Jonathon Green, p. 77