Milton Friedman on Politics

"There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves."

"There is an invisible hand in politics that operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market."

"The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem and very often makes the problem worse."

"Will we read next that government control of prices has created a shortage of sand in the Sahara?"

"The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny."

"Thank heaven that we don’t get all of the government that we are made to pay for."

"If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven't cut taxes enough."

"The key need in policy-setting is to reverse the growth of government!"

"They think that the cure to big government is to have bigger government... the only effective cure is to reduce the scope of government - get government out of the business."

"There's a smokestack on the back of every government program."

"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program."

"It's nice to elect the right people, but that isn't the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things."

"The smaller the unit of government and the more restricted the functions assigned government, the less likely it is that its actions will reflect special interests rather than the general interest."

"Make politics an avocation, not a vocation."

"Friedman's views of the Chilean government"

"Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist."

"The major disadvantage of the proposed negative income tax is its political implications. It establishes a system under which taxes are imposed on some to pay subsidies to others. And presumably, these others have a vote."

"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."

"If you look at every program that the government has adopted in the direction of extending its scope, it took an enormous propaganda campaign by special propaganda groups to get those measures passed. There was no underlining public demand for those measures. On the contrary, the demand had to be created, it had to be developed, it had to be produced. And it was created, it was developed, it was produced, by people… who sincerely wanted to see an expansion in the scope of government."

"I was not in Chile as a guest of the government. I was in Chile as the guest of a private organization… I must say, it's such a wonderful example of a double standard, because I had spent time in Yugoslavia, which was a communist country. I later gave a series of lectures in China. When I came back from communist China, I wrote a letter to the Stanford Daily newspaper in which I said, '"It's curious. I gave exactly the same lectures in China that I gave in Chile. I have had many demonstrations against me for what I said in Chile. Nobody has made any objections to what I said in China. How come?"

"That is a widespread myth, that it is possible to spend money with nobody paying for it. You have everybody screaming that we ought to have new, bigger, more generous government programs. Where are we going to raise the money? Tax business. But business corporations can’t pay any taxes. A corporate executive may sign the check, but where does he get the money? From his stockholders or from his customers or from his employees. Unlike the federal government, he doesn’t have a printing press in his basement. So the only way he can pay money to the government is imposing a burden on somebody. Government cannot spend money at nobody’s expense."