Milton Friedman Quotes
Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.
Friedman, Milton. Tyranny of the Status Quo. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
In one of the harshest self criticisms in Congressional history:
Gallatin was complaining about requirements of Congress, with which he and Madison disagreed but were not powerful enough to stop.
The "spigot" refers to the fact that immediately after the 9-11 attack, huge sums of money were available and the Department of Homeland Security was created by moving many different agencies from other departments into the new department. There were poor or no fiscal controls, and at the same time the public officials of the new department were under such extreme pressure lest there might be another attack that they went forward with almost every scheme that anyone claimed would make the nation safer. Most were useless and some just frauds, and much money was wasted. What is particularly interesting about this quotation is that a high government official admitted that things were handled badly and money had been wasted.
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.
