Milton Friedman: Frasi in inglese (pagina 2)

Origine: Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Ch. 1 The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom, 2002 edition, page 10
Contesto: Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like : the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the general trend of historical development. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions. So also did political freedom in the golden age of Greece and in the early days of the Roman era.
History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.

America's Drug Forum interview (1991)
Contesto: It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users.
Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons.

As quoted in The Power of Choice (January 2007)
Contesto: The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the text books long after I am gone.

Preface (1982 edition), p. ix
Capitalism and Freedom (1962)
Contesto: There is enormous inertia—a tyranny of the status quo—in private and especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

From Created Equal, an episode of the PBS Free to Choose television series (1980, vol. 5 transcript) http://www.freetochoosemedia.org/broadcasts/freetochoose/detail_ftc1980_transcript.php?page=5.
Variante: The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.

Interview with Richard Heffner on The Open Mind (7 December 1975)

Origine: An Economist's Protest: Columns in Political Economy (1966), p. 107

Statement made in 1980, as quoted in The Cynic's Lexicon : A Dictionary Of Amoral Advice‎ (1984), by Jonathon Green, p. 77

One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.
America's Drug Forum interview (1991)

Origine: (1962), Ch. 1 The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom, 2002 edition, page 15

From Created Equal, an episode of the PBS Free to Choose television series (1980, vol. 5 transcript) http://www.freetochoosemedia.org/broadcasts/freetochoose/detail_ftc1980_transcript.php?page=5.

Origine: (1962), Ch. 3 The Control of Money, p. 50

Origine: Free to Choose (1980), Ch. 1 "The Power of the Market", page 13
Contesto: The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.