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Quotes of the Day for 31 July 2009 – Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman was born at Brooklyn, New York on this day in 1912. His mother ran a small dry goods store, his father worked at various things without much success. Even though his father died the year he graduated from high school, Friedman was expected to go to college although his mother and older sisters were unable to pay for much of it. His college career was predicated on scholarships, getting his BA from Rutgers, his Masters from the University of Chicago, and his PhD from Columbia. He won the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science (often casually referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics) in 1976. Friedman's research has led him to take a libertarian stance on many issues, so not only do I tend to agree with him, he's one of the few practitioners of The Dismal Science who isn't terminally boring.
You will find an expanded profile, photo, additional biographical links, and all quotes from this author on the author's Notable Quotable page.
The quotes:
A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it ... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Complete free trade is not politically feasible. Why? Because it's only in the general interest and in no one's special interest.
Everywhere, and at all times, economic progress has meant far more to the poor than to the rich.
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.
Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.
With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.
All from Milton Friedman, 1912 - 2006
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