Frases de Milton Friedman

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“Hay una cortina de humo detrás de cada programa de gobierno.”

“La causa de la libre empresa, de la competencia, es la única que puede mantener a los capitalistas alejados de tener un poder excesivo. Hay un viejo dicho que reza: "si quieres cazar a un ladrón, llama a otro para que lo atrape". La virtud del capitalismo de libre empresa es aquél que coloca a un empresario frente a otro, y ese es el método más efectivo de control.”

“Mucha gente quiere que el gobierno proteja a los consumidores. Un problema mucho más urgente es proteger a los consumidores del gobierno.”

“Uno de los más grandes errores es juzgar a las políticas y programas por sus intenciones, en lugar de por sus resultados.”

“Nada es tan permanente como un programa temporal del gobierno.”

“Mucha gente se queja del despilfarro público, pero yo lo doy por bueno, por dos razones. En primer lugar la eficiencia no es nada deseable si alguien está haciendo algo malo. El Gobierno hace cosas que no queremos que haga, de modo que cuando más dinero despilfarre, mejor. En segundo lugar, el despilfarro lleva a los hogares de la gente el hecho de que el Gobierno no es un instrumento eficiente y efectivo para conseguir sus objetivos. Una de mis esperanzas es la desilusión creciente con la idea de que el Gobierno es ese hermano mayor siempre sabio, todopoderoso, que puede resolver cualquier problema que salte en el camino.”

“Hay muchas variantes del liberalismo. Hay un liberalismo de gobierno cero; anarquista. Hay un liberalismo de gobierno limitado. Comparten un montón en términos de sus valores fundamentales. Si los llevas hasta sus últimos términos, son diferentes. No parece importar en la práctica, porque ambos queremos trabajar en la misma dirección.”

“El poder centralizado no se vuelve inofensivo por las buenas intenciones de quienes lo crearon.”

“Sólo el gobierno es capaz de coger un papel perfectamente bueno, cubrirlo con tinta perfectamente buena y hacer una combinación absolutamente banal.”

“Una fuente mayor de objeciones a la economía libre es precisamente que […] da a la gente lo que quiere, en vez de lo que un grupo particular piensa que debería querer. Subyacente a la mayoría de los argumentos contra el mercado libre existe una falta de fe en la libertad misma.”

“Cualquier amigo de la libertad ha de revolverse como lo hago yo contra la perspectiva de convertir a los Estados Unidos en un campo armado, por la visión de las cárceles repletas por consumidores de drogas y por un ejército de burócratas con el poder de invadir la libertad de los ciudadanos, basándose en una evidencia somera.”

“Aunque necesario para la libertad, el capitalismo sólo no es suficiente para garantizarla. Tiene que estar acompañado por un conjunto de valores y de instituciones políticas favorables a la libertad.”

“El hombre libre no se pregunta ni qué puede hacer su país por él, ni qué puede hacer él por su país.”

“Los grandes avances de la civilización, ya sean en arquitectura o pintura, en ciencia o literatura, jamás han venido de un gobierno central.”

“La responsabilidad social de los negocios consiste en incrementar sus beneficios.”

“Los gobiernos no aprenden jamás. Las personas sí lo hacen.”

“está usted equivocado, a no ser que se refiera a la historia de EU del siglo pasado y la primera parte de este siglo. Desde 1933 EU ha ido en la dirección que México llevó a sus extremos. En estos momentos el Estado dispone de más del 50% del ingreso nacional a través de programas, regulaciones, mandatos, etc., el mejor ejemplo para ustedes es el Hong Kong de los últimos 30 años.”

“El salario mínimo impide a muchas personas obtener un empleo.”

“Lo que importa no es la inflación per se, sino la inflación no anticipada”

“Colón no buscó una nueva ruta a las Indias en respuesta a una directiva elegida mayoritariamente.”

“Es una suerte que la sociedad libre sea más productiva, porque de no haberlo sido jamás se habría tolerado. El prejuicio en su contra es tan poderoso que es necesario tener una ventaja de cinco a uno para vencerlo.”

“Siempre se ha argüido que el problema del capitalismo es que es materialista, mientras que el colectivismo puede permitirse prestar atención a lo no material. Pero la experiencia ha sido exactamente la contraria. No hay sociedades que hayan enfatizado los requisitos materiales del bienestar como las colectivistas. Son las sociedades libres las que, de lejos, han permitido un mayor desarrollo a los aspectos inmateriales, espirituales, artísticos del bienestar.”

“Por supuesto, la existencia de un mercado libre no elimina la necesidad de un gobierno. Por el contrario, como hemos dicho, el gobierno es esencial como foro para determinar “las reglas del juego” y como árbitro para aplicar las reglas que se decidan.”

“Estoy a favor de bajar los impuestos bajo cualquier circunstancia, por cualquier excusa y por cualquier razón, siempre que sea posible.”

“La inflación es un impuesto sin legislación.”

“La solución gubernamental a un problema es normalmente tan mala como el mismo problema.”

“La cantidad de dinero, precios y producción fueron definitivamente más inestables después de implantar el Sistema de la Reserva Federal.”

“«La vida no es justa. es tentador creer que el gobierno puede corregir lo que la naturaleza ha generado.”

“Los almuerzos gratis no existen.”

“Si un intercambio entre dos partes es voluntario, no tendrá lugar a menos que ambas partes crean que se beneficiarán de él. La mayoría de las falacias económicas derivan del perder de vista esta simple reflexión.”

“Tenemos un sistema que cobra cada vez más impuestos al trabajo y subsidia el no trabajar.”

“Los verdaderos impuestos al pueblo no son lo que usted llama impuestos, son los gastos públicos totales. Si el congreso gasta más dinero del que le entra, si el gobierno gasta todo ese dinero, ¿quién cree usted que lo está pagando? Santa Claus no lo está pagando, un hada no lo está pagando… usted y yo, como contribuyentes, lo estamos pagando indirectamente a través de la tributación oculta, y por eso el punto crucial es reducir los gastos totales del gobierno.”

“En los únicos casos en los que las masas se han escapado de la clase de miseria absoluta que estás hablando, los únicos casos registrados en la historia, son donde se ha tenido capitalismo y en gran parte libre comercio. Si quieres saber donde las masas están en peor situación, peores condiciones, es exactamente en el tipo de sociedades que se apartan de eso. De modo que el registro de la historia es absolutamente cristalina, que no existe una forma alternativa hasta ahora descubierta de mejorar la situación de las personas comunes y corrientes que pueden sostener una vela a las actividades productivas que se desencadenan por el sistema de libre empresa.”

“Nadie gasta el dinero de otra persona tan cuidadosamente como gasta el suyo. Nadie usa los recursos de otra persona con tanto cuidado como utiliza los suyos. Así que si quieres la eficiencia y la eficacia, si desea que el conocimiento sea utilizado apropiadamente, usted tiene que hacerlo a través de los medios de propiedad privada.”

“For both long and short periods there is a consistent though not precise relation between the rate of growth of the quantity of money and the rate of growth of nominal income. If the quantity of money grows rapidly, so will nominal income, and conversely. The relation is much closer for long than for short periods”

“Make politics an avocation, not a vocation.”

“There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.”

“As liberals, we take freedom of the individual, or perhaps the family, as our ultimate goal in judging social arrangements. Freedom as a value in this sense has to do with the interrelations among people”

“The widespread use of the market reduces the strain on the social fabric by rendering conformity unnecessary with respect to any activities it encompasses. The wider the range of activities covered by the market, the fewer are the issues on which explicitly political decisions are required and hence on which it is necessary to achieve agreement. In turn, the fewer the issues on which agreement is necessary, the greater is the likelihood of getting agreement while maintaining a free society.”

“There was nothing in these views to repel a student; or to make Keynes attractive. Keynes had nothing to offer those of us who had sat at the feet of Simons, Mints, Knight, and Viner.”

“Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. … And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold.”

“The contraction from 1929 to 1933 was by far the most severe business-cycle contraction during the near-century of U. S. history we cover and it may well have been the most severe in the whole of U. S. history.”

“In the course of General Westmoreland's testimony, he made the statement that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. I stopped him and said, 'General, would you rather command an army of slaves?' He drew himself up and said, 'I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.' I replied, 'I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries.' But I went on to say, 'If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher.”

“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.”

“The business of business is business.”

“The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem and very often makes the problem worse.”

“The construction of hypotheses is a creative act of inspiration, intuition, invention; its essence is the vision of something new in familiar material. The process must be discussed in psychological, not logical, categories; studied in autobiographies and biographies, not treatises on scientific method; and promoted by maxim and example, not syllogism or theorem.”

“The organization of economic activity through voluntary exchange presumes that we have provided, through government, for the maintenance of law and order to prevent coercion of one individual by another, the enforcement of contracts voluntarily entered into, the definition of the meaning of property rights, the interpretation and enforcement of such rights, and the provision of a monetary framework.”

“A liberal is fundamentally fearful of concentrated power. His objective is to preserve the maximum degree of freedom for each individual separately that is compatible with one man's freedom not interfering with other men's freedom. He believes that this objective requires that power be dispersed. He is suspicious of assigning to government any functions that can be performed through the market, both because this substitutes coercion for voluntary co-operation in the area in question and because, by giving government an increased role, it threatens freedom in other areas.”

“There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.”

“Freedom is a tenable objective only for responsible individuals. We do not believe in freedom for madmen or children. The necessity of drawing a line between responsible individuals and others is inescapable, yet it means that there is an essential ambiguity in our ultimate objective of freedom. Paternalism is inescapable for those whom we designate as not responsible.”

“Whether it is in the slums of New Delhi or in the affluence of Las Vegas, it simply isn't fair that there should be any losers. Life is unfair — there is nothing fair about one man being born blind and another man being born with sight. There is nothing fair about one man being born of a wealthy parent and one of an impecunious parent. There is nothing fair about Muhammad Ali having been born with a skill that enables him to make millions of dollars one night. There is nothing fair about Marlene Dietrich having great legs that we all want to watch. There is nothing fair about any of that. But on the other hand, don't you think a lot of people who like to look at Marlene Dietrich's legs benefited from nature's unfairness in producing a Marlene Dietrich. What kind of a world would it be if everybody was an absolute identical duplicate of anybody else. You might as well destroy the whole world and just keep one specimen left for a museum. In the same way, it's unfair that Muhammad Ali should be a great fighter and should be able to earn millions. But would it not be even more unfair to the people who like to watch him if you said that in the pursuit of some abstract idea of equality we're not going to let Muhammad Ali get more for one nights fight than the lowest man on the totem pole can get for a days unskilled work on the docks. You can do that but the result of that would be to deny people the opportunity to watch Muhammad Ali. I doubt very much he would be willing to subject himself to the kind of fights he's gone through if he were to get the pay of an unskilled docker.”

“The major disadvantage of the proposed negative income tax is its political implications. It establishes a system under which taxes are imposed on some to pay subsidies to others. And presumably, these others have a vote.”

“Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion—the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary co-operation of individuals—the technique of the market place.”

“A government which maintained law and order, defined property rights, served as a means whereby we could modify property rights and other rules of the economic game, adjudicated disputes about the interpretation of the rules, enforced contracts, promoted competition, provided a monetary framework, engaged in activities to counter technical monopolies and to overcome neighborhood effects widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify government intervention, and which supplemented private charity and the private family in protecting the irresponsible, whether madman or child—such a government would clearly have important functions to perform. The consistent liberal is not an anarchist.”

“How much attention is paid to agreement between Galbraith and myself in opposing a draft and favoring an all-volunteer armed force, or in opposing tariffs and favoring free trade, or on a host of other issues? What is newsworthy is that Galbraith endorses wage and price controls, while I oppose them.”

“Over the period covered by these data, a drastic change has occurred in the responsibilities undertaken by the state to provide assistance to the aged, unemployed and otherwise dependent. This change has had divergent results on the particular data under discussion. The availability of assistance from the state would clearly tend to reduce the need for private reserves and so to reduce private saving—it is equivalent, in terms of our hypothesis, to a reduction in the variance of transitory components.”

“Although I wish the anarchists luck, since that’s the way we ought to be moving now. But I believe we need government to enforce the rules of the game. By prosecuting anti-trust violations, for instance. We need a government to maintain a system of courts that will uphold contracts and rule on compensation for damages. We need a government to ensure the safety of its citizens–to provide police protection. But government is failing at a lot of these things that it ought to be doing because it’s involved in so many things it shouldn’t be doing.”

“If we have system in which government is in a position to give large favor - it's human nature to try to get this favor - whether those people are large enterprises, or whether they're small businesses like farmers, or whether they're representatives of any other special group. The only way to prevent that is to force them to engage in competition one with the other.”

“The basic problem of social organization is how to co-ordinate the economic activities of large numbers of people.”

“The strongest argument for free enterprise is that it prevents anybody from having too much power. Whether that person is a government official, a trade union official, or a business executive. If forces them to put up or shut up. They either have to deliver the goods, produce something that people are willing to pay for, are willing to buy, or else they have to go into a different business.”

“The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”

“I am convinced that the minimum-wage law is the most anti-Negro law on our statute books—in its effect, not its intent.”