Milton Friedman Quotes

The biggest problem that we have is that California is being run now by special interests. All of the politicians are not anymore making the moves for the people, but for special interests and we have to stop that.

By killing transparency and competition, crony capitalism is harmful to free enterprise, opportunity, and economic growth. And by substituting special interests for the public interest, it is harmful to democratic expression.

Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy.

All of these people who are organized with these oil-and-gas interests, that's in the administration and friends of the President of the United States [Donald Trump], these back channeling that you see. These are a bunch of scumbags. That's what they are.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Crony capitalism is alive and well: the big are bigger, the wealthy are getting wealthier because, with a very large powerful complicated government, which is what we have and which Democrats want more of, only the big, the powerful, the wealthy and the well connected can survive.

Oh, that all the things my father had told me about how disgusting Washington is are true. And again it's the system - there are lots of nice, well-meaning people there. But it's a sleazy place. And politics is all about doing favors.

I'm not against business. I'm against big business in bed with big government.

Big-government economics breeds crony capitalism. It's corrupt, anything but neutral, and a barrier to broad participation in prosperity.

We do live in an environment of crony capitalism, and the main reason we do is that loopholes are for sale, and both parties have their hands out through those loopholes.

Subsidies and mandates are just two of the privileges that government can bestow on politically connected friends. Others include grants, loans, tax credits, favorable regulations, bailouts, loan guarantees, targeted tax breaks and no-bid contracts.

Whether you are on the Right or the Left, everyone can agree that there are a lot of outside influences in American politics that are not good for the system. There's just too much money.

The incestuous relationship between government and big business thrives in the dark.

Campaign finance and ethics reform only works if it curtails all special interest groups equally and does not carve out any exceptions to benefit one party or another. 'Pay to play' reform was passed to limit the influence of big spending contractors over the public officials from whom they are trying to obtain work.

I understand how bureaucracies work. And that's important because our government has become a vast, huge, bloated, corrupt bureaucracy.

Business and politics have a wholesome and an unwholesome interface. You have to eliminate the unwholesome interface.

Everybody who goes into government gets somewhat chewed up in the process. Being a senior appointee is like being at a startup, only more so: You run into opposition from the entrenched oligopoly of contractors whose business model is to extract as much money from government as possible for doing as little as possible.

Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs - even when we benefit from them.

Republicans say they don't believe in government. Sure they do. They believe in government to help themselves and their powerful friends.

I don't believe you can find any evidence of the fact that I have changed government policy solely because of a contribution.

Spending limits not only do not work, they have the perverse effect of making special interests more powerful and more influential.

The principal reasons that special interests can extract their price from government is money .... Those who do not accept money from PACs are those who have other sources.

[Lobbying] has reached such a position of power that it threatens the government itself. Its size, its power, its capacity for evil; its greed, trickery, deception and fraud condemn it to the death it deserves.

Government isn't a religion. It shouldn't be treated as such. It's not God; it's humans, fallible people, feathering their nests most of the time.

Those guys [congressmen] lived on the basis of getting their little tidbits and their perks.