Friday Filosophy v.05.13.2022
Friday Filosophy v.05.13.2022
Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist. He believed in monetarism. Monetarism is the theory that how much money the government prints each year has a huge effect on the economy. He supports the government printing the same low rate of money each year rather than a different amount each year.
Friedman was born in Brooklyn, New York to a Hungarian–Jewish family. He was raised in Rahway, New Jersey. Friedman studied at Rutgers University, at Columbia University, and at the University of Chicago. He worked thirty years in Chicago with George Stigler as a leader of the Chicago school of economics.
During the 1970s, Milton Friedman’s idea of monetarism gained popularity and he became an economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan. Friedman believed that the government control over the economy should be limited. He supported cutting taxes, lowering government spending, getting rid of government rules that limited the economy and letting parents choose which school their taxes paid for. His political views were libertarian. He was against forcing people to join the army, and said that getting rid of United States military conscription was the thing he was most proud of doing.
Throughout several decades, Friedman made many documentaries, books, and interviews to express his views to the public. The main books he wrote were Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose.
- When government – in pursuit of good intentions – tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.
- Inflation is taxation without legislation.
- Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
- We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
- There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
- I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash – a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B without A knowing B or B knowing A.
- I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.
- Governments never learn. Only people learn.
- Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
- The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties’ benefit.
- Indeed, 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.
- Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.
- 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.
- And what does reward virtue? You think the communist commissar rewards virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think, excuse me, if you’ll pardon me, American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout?
- I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.
- 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.
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