Milton Friedman Liberty Quotations

The excuse for the destruction of liberty is always the plea of necessary ' that there is no alternative

The preservation of liberty, not the promotion of efficiency, is the primary justification for private property. Efficiency is a happy, though not accidental, by-product - and a most important by-product because liberty could not have survived if it had not also produced affluence.

A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. And 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.

Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else's parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds.

I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the nineteenth century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good.

Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals - the technique of the marketplace.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.

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

Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised.

A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.

When a man spends his own money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about how much he spends and how he spends it. When a man spends his own money to buy something for someone else, he is still very careful about how much he spends, but somewhat less what he spends it on. When a man spends someone else's money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about what he buys, but doesn't care at all how much he spends. And when a man spends someone else's money on someone else, he does't care how much he spends or what he spends it on. And that's government for you.

If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.