Happy Birthday, Milton Friedman! Here Are Our Favorite Freidman Quotes
For today’s “top whatever” list, we’re going to commemorate the 100th birthday of Nobel Prize-winning conservative economist Milton Friedman. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Friedman, here’s what you need to know: he rescued the U.S. economy from the clutches of President Carter’s stagflation [i.e. rising inflation and unemployment] and, as the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore puts it, he “saved capitalism.”
“Next to Ronald Reagan, in the second half of the 20th century there was no more influential voice for economic freedom world-wide than Milton Friedman,” writes Moore.
“Small in stature but a giant intellect, he was the economist who saved capitalism by dismembering the ideas of central planning when most of academia was mesmerized by the creed of government as savior,” he adds.
And like most towering intellects, Friedman was a font of pithy and brilliant one-liners. In honor of his birthday, here are our favorite quotes from Milton Friedman with accompanying words from Stephen Moore: