Milton Friedman 🇺🇸

Entrepreneur, libertarian, politics junkie, #BTC

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

High profits in an industry are a flare shot into the night sky. They tell every entrepreneur and investor where the public wants more output. Tax or shame the signal and you get the shortage. Profit is the market asking for more.

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

A tariff is a tax on your neighbor for buying something you could not make as cheaply. The importer pays it, passes it on, and the consumer never sees the line item. Protection saves a few visible jobs and costs a great many invisible ones.

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

Accreditation is a licensing board run by the incumbents. Existing universities decide which new ones may call themselves colleges, and whether their students can borrow federal money. Ask the guild whether it wants competition and you will learn what the answer is.

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

A new administration has about six months to change things. After that, the beneficiaries of the status quo have organized, the press has turned, and the moment is gone. Reform is rarely defeated by argument. It is defeated by delay.

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

The city builds the stadium, the owner keeps the gate, and the voters are told it's an investment. Compared to what? A dollar spent on a ballpark is a dollar not spent on anything else. The team moves anyway when a better offer arrives.

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

Low interest rates are not a sign that money is easy. Rates are a price, not a quantity. Japan had near-zero rates for decades while money stayed tight and prices stagnated. Judge policy by the growth of the money stock, not by the price of borrowing it.

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, within the rules of the game. That is not a license to cheat. It is a refusal to let executives play philanthropist with money that belongs to someone else. Let them give their own.

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

Earn one more dollar, lose your housing voucher, your food stamps, your childcare subsidy — all at once. We built a system that taxes the poor at rates no economist would dare propose for the rich. Call it what it is: a wall against work.

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

Business wants profits without competition. The market wants competition that eats profits for breakfast. Confuse the two and you end up subsidizing the very firms the market was supposed to discipline.

[Milton Friedman Daily @MiltonFriedmanW]

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

— Milton Friedman

[Milton Friedman Daily @MiltonFriedmanW]

Milton Friedman:

“The Great Depression was not produced by a failure of business. On the contrary, it was produced by a failure of government.”

“The Federal Reserve will not fail in the same way again. This time it will fail in a different way. This time it has been failing, not by producing a Great Depression, but by producing an inflation.”

“Just as you will hear the story that it was business that was responsible for the Depression, so you will today hear the story that it is labor and management that are responsible for inflation.”

[Milton Friedman Daily @MiltonFriedmanW]

Milton Friedman:

“Economists don’t know much, but there’s one thing we know very, very well—and that’s how to produce shortages.”

“You want a shortage of housing in New York City? Set a maximum price on rent, and you will have a shortage of housing.”

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

The ATM arrived to eliminate the bank teller. Teller employment then rose for thirty years. Machines cut the cost per branch, banks opened more branches, tellers did less counting and more selling. Automation destroys tasks, not necessarily jobs.

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

New money doesn't land equally. It reaches banks and asset holders first, bidding up what they buy before prices rise generally. By the time wages catch up, early recipients have already gained at late recipients' expense. Inflation has a distribution, not just a rate.

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

A deficit is a future tax with the price tag hidden. Borrow today, and someone — maybe not you, maybe your grandchildren — pays principal, interest, and the cost of resources government used instead of letting markets allocate them.

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

Davis-Bacon, 1931: Southern congressmen wanted federal contractors kept from hiring black laborers who'd underbid union wages. The "prevailing wage" was the mechanism. Ninety years later it still prices the least-connected worker out of the job site.

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

A patent is a government grant of monopoly, same species as a taxi medallion. Sometimes the incentive to invent justifies it. Often it just lets the first mover sue the second one into never showing up. Treat it with the same suspicion you'd give any other monopoly grant.

[Milton Friedman 🇺🇸 @MiltonFriedman]

Amtrak has lost money every year since 1971 and calls it a public service. A grocery store that lost money every year would call itself bankrupt. The only difference is who's forced to cover the loss.

[Voices of Liberty @VoLDaily]

“The government is too big. It’s too intrusive. It restricts what we can do. It’s becoming our master instead of our servant.”

— Milton Friedman

[Milton Friedman Daily @MiltonFriedmanW]

“I am a liberal in the true sense of the word. The word is now used in a distorted way. The modern liberal is only liberal with other people’s money.”

— Milton Friedman