Milton Friedman 🇺🇸

Lower interest rates don't create real savings. They create the illusion of cheap capital. Entrepreneurs borrow for projects the economy can't actually sustain. The boom feels wonderful. The correction is the price of the fiction.

“Too often what are called ‘educated’ people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings.” — Thomas Sowell

The government takes a dollar from you, keeps thirty cents for administration, then gives you back seventy cents and tells you how to spend it. This is what passes for public generosity.

“Trade unions in the course of time were granted privileges which the ordinary citizen has not—essentially various uses of force and violence to prevent others from working at the terms that they work.” — Friedrich Hayek

Inflation is not "prices going up." It's the value of money going down — because too much of it was created. Blaming grocers for inflation is like blaming the thermometer for the fever.

Ronald Reagan awarding Milton Friedman the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1988 🔥 “Teacher, scholar, and theorist—Milton Friedman restored common sense to the world of economics.” “A winner of the Nobel Prize, Milton Friedman’s technical mastery of his profession is unchallenged.” “But more central to his work is its moral component: an idea of human freedom in which man’s economic rights are as vital as his civil and human rights.” “It is for his celebration of the human spirit as well as the brilliance of his mind that I bestow upon Milton Friedman the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

Without secure property rights, no one invests in what can be seized. Civil asset forfeiture lets government take your property without convicting you of a crime. That's not law enforcement. That's confiscation with a badge.

When inflation falls from 9% to 0%, politicians celebrate. But prices never came back down. They locked in every penny of the increase. Zero inflation doesn't mean prices fell. It means they stopped rising. The damage is permanent. Don't confuse the speedometer with the ditch.

The average American works until mid-April just to pay federal, state, and local taxes. That means for nearly four months a year, you work not for your family but for the government. No mugger in history has ever been that ambitious.

A family trapped in a failing school district is told to wait for reform. But they don't need reform. They need an exit. Vouchers don't fix bad schools — they let children escape them. Competition does the fixing.

Government borrowing doesn't avoid the cost of spending — it hides it. Every deficit dollar is a future tax dollar plus interest. The national debt is a bill mailed to people too young to vote and too unborn to object. That's not finance. It's evasion.

The Fed names Powell chair pro tempore until Warsh is sworn in. Musical chairs at the top changes nothing. What matters is whether the new chair understands one thing: stable, predictable money growth. Personnel is not policy. The rule is the policy.

Without secure property rights, no one invests, no one builds, no one plans beyond tomorrow. Civil asset forfeiture lets government seize property without conviction. That isn't law enforcement. It's the destruction of the very foundation prosperity requires.

No committee of experts knows what a single classroom needs. The teacher who sees the child, the parent who knows the home — dispersed knowledge always defeats distant authority. Vouchers don't just empower families. They let local knowledge work.

“Language grew through the free market, through voluntary cooperation. I used the word. You used the word. If it’s mutually advantageous to keep using that word, we keep on using.” — Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman: “What the governmental system abounds in is expansion of the mistakes.” “There is no mechanism for eliminating governmental agencies which are no longer needed or have behaved perversely.”

Immigrants move to where their labor is valued most. That's not a crisis — it's the price system working across borders. The real question is never whether immigration helps "the economy." It's whether government policy lets both sides of the exchange benefit freely.

The Fed's household survey shows Americans still feel squeezed despite "cooling" inflation. Of course they do. Inflation measures the rate of increase, not the level. Prices don't come back down. The damage from monetary excess is cumulative and permanent.

No committee can replicate what the price system does every second — transmit information about scarcity, preferences, and opportunity across millions of strangers who never meet. A price is a telegram. A five-year plan is a guess.

Rent control is a promise to current tenants paid for by future ones who will never find an apartment. Zoning boards are cartels of existing homeowners dressed up as city planning. Both restrict supply and call the resulting shortage a "crisis."