Milton Friedman Quotes

We may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.

It is easier to waste time on bureaucratic reorganization than it is to accomplish anything concrete.

Lacking a profit motive, workers in the government by and large have a different work ethic from those in private industry. When they could make one call, federal workers take a meeting. When they could find an answer on the Internet, they form a study committee. Instead of appointing one supervisor, they appoint five.

Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything.

I think there is a lot of fat in the government.

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.

Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.

A committee is a group of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

I feel like I'm wasting time if I repeat myself.

Well, you could take several stories off the buildings of most U.S. government agencies and we'd all probably be better for it too.

Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to be appointed to do the work.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

Among the weeds choking out growth and good government are the hundreds of boards, commissions, and advisory committees that have sprouted over the years. They devour time, money, and energy far beyond any real contribution they make.

Or the Department of Education and another ministry were worried about duplication of effort, so what did they do? They set up two committees to look into duplication and neither knew what the other was up to. It really is a world beyond parody.

Should bureaucratic ways prevail and paper reign supreme? Should red tape and the Status Quo become our nation’s dream?

The bureaucracy is what we all suffer from..

The major functions of the government are … operated by deeply embedded, hopelessly entangled bureaus where nothing is accomplished because the function of the bureau is to intercept every living idea and smother it.

It offends me when people do useless work.

One of the hardest areas is duplication; everyone knows there's lots of duplication in government. But when you ask someone, 'OK, name two programs that are duplicative,' typically there's a long pause.

We had taken the cups for coffee out of the building as a cost-saving measure, but left the coffee. Somebody thought it was symbolic to do this.

There’s enough fat in the federal government that if you rendered it, you could wash the world.

The machinery of government is a vast series of interlocking hierarchies riddled through and through with incompetence.

It is not necessary to light a candle to the sun

I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.