The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
— Thomas Sowell
The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.
— David Friedman
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.
— Milton Friedman
The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
— Milton Friedman
It is because it's prohibited. See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.
— Milton Friedman
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 only gain at the expense of another.
— Milton Friedman
Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
— Milton Friedman
For one thing, there are many “inventions” that are not patentable. The “inventor” of the supermarket, for example, conferred great benefits on his fellowmen for which he could not charge them. Insofar as the same kind of ability is required for the one kind of invention as for the other, the existence of patents tends to divert activity to patentable inventions.
— Milton Friedman
The real minimum wage is zero: unemployment.
— Thomas Sowell
State run lotteries: think of them as tax breaks for the intelligent.
— Evan Leibovitch
From the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by free men comes cheaper in the end than the work performed by slaves. Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.
— Adam Smith
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair
When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
— Milton Friedman
of course the country could never listen to this guy....it just makes too much damn sense.
— ryanx0 about Milton Friedman [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se_TJzB9-z0]
Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes -- excusable or not -- can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic -- this is the key political argument against an independent central bank. . .To paraphrase Clemenceau: money is much too serious a matter to be left to the Central Bankers.
— Milton Friedman