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.”

“The broader and more influential organisations of businessmen have acted to undermine the basic foundation of the free market system they purport to represent and defend.”

“Every friend of freedom… must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.”

“So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.”

“Prices perform three functions in organizing economic activity: first, they transmit information; second, they provide an incentive to adopt those methods of production that are least costly and thereby use available resources for the most highly valued pur poses; third, they determine who gets how much of the product—the distribution of income. These three functions are closely in terrelated.”

“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.”

“I think it is only because capitalism has proved so enormously more efficient than alternative methods that it has survived at all. (…) I'm not sure capitalism is the right word. There is a sense in which every society is capitalist. The Soviet Union was capitalist, but it was state capitalism. Latin American societies in the past have been capitalist, but it has been oligarchic capitalism. So what we really need to talk about is not capitalism but free market or competitive capitalism which is the system that we would like to have adopted, not just capitalism.”

“There's no such thing as a free lunch.”

“The price system transmits only the important information and only to the people who need to know.”

“The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights, subject only to the proviso that he not interfere with the freedom of other individuals to do the same.”

“Over short periods, the relation between growth in money and growth in nominal income is often hard to see, partly because the relation is less close for short than for long periods, but mostly because it takes time for changes in monetary growth to affect income. And how long a time is itself variable. Today's income growth is not closely related to today's monetary growth; it depends on what has been happening to money in the past. What happens to money today affects what is going to happen to income in the future”

“The need for government in these respects arises because absolute freedom is impossible. However attractive anarchy may be as a philosophy, it is not feasible in a world of imperfect men.”

“Keynes was a great economist. In every discipline, progress comes from people who make hypotheses, most of which turn out to be wrong, but all of which ultimately point to the right answer. Now Keynes, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, set forth a hypothesis which was a beautiful one, and it really altered the shape of economics. But it turned out that it was a wrong hypothesis. That doesn't mean that he wasn't a great man!”

“The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them.”

“[A] society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom.”

“Is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it's only the other fellow who's greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it's exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system.”

“The liberal conceives of men as imperfect beings. He regards the problem of social organization to be as much a negative problem of preventing 'bad' people from doing harm as of enabling 'good' people to do good; and, of course, 'bad' and 'good' people may be the same people, depending on who is judging them.”

“If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven't cut taxes enough.”

“Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.”

“To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is much too serious a matter to be left to the Central Bankers.”

“The smaller the unit of government and the more restricted the functions assigned government, the less likely it is that its actions will reflect special interests rather than the general interest.”

“A worker is protected from his employer by the existence of other employers for who he can go to work. An employer is protected from exploitation by his employees by the existence of other workers whom he can hire. The consumer is protected from exploitation by a given seller by the existence of other sellers from whom he can buy.”

“The threat to public schools arises from their defects, not their accomplishments. In small, closely knit communities where public schools, particularly elementary schools, are now reasonably satisfactory, not even the most comprehensive voucher plan would have much effect. The public schools would remain dominant, perhaps somewhat improved by the threat of potential competition. But elsewhere, and particularly in the urban slums where the public schools are doing such a poor job, most parents would undoubtedly try to send their children to nonpublic schools.”

“A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality.”

“In the past century a myth has grown up that free market capitalism—equality of opportunity as we have interpreted that term—increases such inequalities, that it is a system under which the rich exploit the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wherever the free market has been permitted to operate, wherever anything approaching equality of opportunity has existed, the ordinary man has been able to attain levels of living never dreamed of before. Nowhere is the gap between rich and poor wider, nowhere are the rich richer and the poor poorer, than in those societies that do not permit the free market to operate.”

“As these remarks indicate, the Social Security program involves a transfer from the young to the old. To some extent such a transfer has occurred throughout history—the young supporting their parents, or other relatives, in old age. Indeed, in many poor countries with high infant death rates, like India, the desire to assure oneself of progeny who can provide support in old age is a major reason for high birth rates and large families. The difference between Social Security and earlier arrangements is that Social Security is compulsory and impersonal—earlier arrangements were voluntary and personal. Moral responsibility is an individual matter, not a social matter. Children helped their parents out of love or duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else’s parents out of compulsion and fear. The earlier transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken them.”

“The supporters of tariffs treat it as self-evident that the creation of jobs is a desirable end, in and of itself, regardless of what the persons employed do. That is clearly wrong. If all we want are jobs, we can create any number—for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs—jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume.”

“When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union — like public housing in the United States — look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.”

“The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.”

“What country in the world today engages in the most extreme anti-Semitic persecution? The Soviet Union. It’s not an accident, because if you have a society with concentrated power, if you have a collectivist society, it’s going to be in a position to exercise the preferences and prejudices of its rulers. Moreover, it’s going to have an incentive to do so, because it’s going to need a scapegoat and it will choose some group like the Jews or the blacks to be the scapegoat.”