Milton Friedman
Our nation lost the man who was possibly its greatest economist of the last 100 years when Milton Friedman passed away 20 years ago. Some of us are old enough to remember his appearances on television in the 1980s, during the Reagan years, when, with rousing phrases, he championed free market policies and small government. For those less familiar, consider these quotes that are representative of Friedman’s thinking:
“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”
“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”
In this 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, it seems a fitting occasion to reflect on the work of people like Friedman, whose policies and philosophies owed much to the directions set by the Founding Fathers. And so we share just a few thoughts.
Author Jennifer Burns wrote this about Friedman three years ago:
“Milton Friedman was, alongside John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century. His work was instrumental in the turn toward free markets that defined the 1980s, and his full-throated defenses of capitalism and freedom resonated with audiences around the world. It’s no wonder the last decades of the twentieth century have been called ‘the Age of Friedman.’”
Investopedia shares this assessment:
“Milton Friedman was a renowned economist and Nobel laureate who championed free-market capitalism and monetarism. His radical advocacy for monetary policy over fiscal policy reshaped macroeconomic thought, challenging the prevailing Keynesian economics of his time, which held that fiscal policy—government spending and tax policies to influence the economy—was more important than monetary policy.”
And a Google A.I. source echoes those sentiments, adding some details:
“Milton Friedman reshaped modern economic thought and public policy in the latter half of the 20th century. Friedman’s influential works, like A Monetary History of the United States, argued that policy focus should shift from government intervention to the power and autonomy of market forces. His prediction of stagflation in the 1970s underscored his ideas’ practicality, showcasing that inflation and unemployment could rise simultaneously, contrary to Keynesian predictions. Friedman’s principles reinforced skepticism toward expansive government roles, advocating policies grounded in real-world outcomes rather than intentions. These contributions significantly influenced economic policies globally, fostering a paradigm shift in both academic and public spheres.”
But the best representation of Milton Friedman is always Friedman himself. And so we end this tribute with these additional quotes of his, most of them elevating not just economic freedom but personal freedom as well.
“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”
“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”
“Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”
“Governments never learn. Only people learn.”
“Society doesn’t have values. People have values.”
“I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they’re responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of.”
“There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.”
Believers in aristocracy and socialism share a faith in centralized rule, in rule by command rather than by voluntary cooperation.”
“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.”
Enjoy your 250th Celebration, everyone! Let freedom ring!
Leave a Reply