John Stossel – Influence of Milton Friedman
When I think of the last 4 years and where the federal government has gone crazy spending our money trying to be “fair,” it makes me realize how wise Milton Friedman was when he talked about how to best achieve equality:
- A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
Here are some quotes from Milton Friedman that I thought you would enjoy:
- 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.
- Article “We Have Socialism, Q.E.D.” in The New York Times (31 December 1989)
- Society doesn’t have values. People have values.
- A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
- The stock of money, prices and output was decidedly more unstable after the establishment of the Reserve System than before. The most dramatic period of instability in output was, of course, the period between the two wars, which includes the severe (monetary) contractions of 1920-1, 1929-33, and 1937-8. No other 20 year period in American history contains as many as three such severe contractions.
This evidence persuades me that at least a third of the price rise during and just after World War I is attributable to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System… and that the severity of each of the major contractions — 1920-1, 1929-33 and 1937-8 is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities…
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.- As quoted in The Money Masters (1995)
- I know of no severe depression, in any country or any time, that was not accompanied by a sharp decline in the stock of money and equally of no sharp decline in the stock of money that was not accompanied by a severe depression.
- As quoted in The Money Masters (1995)
- The Federal Reserve definitely caused the Great Depression by contracting the amount of money in circulation by one-third from 1929 to 1933
- National Public Radio interview (Jan 1996)
- There’s a smokestack on the back of every government program.
- Interview (10 February 1999) in the video production Take It To The Limits: Milton Friedman on Libertarianism.
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programmes by their intentions rather than their results.
