Milton Friedman Quotes
The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 13.
[Most theoretical conservative economists believe this. When presented with the reality of market systems where great damage was done to people and areas, as in the Great Depression of 1929 and the Great Recession in 2008, they tend to argue that these were not really free markets—–that for various reasons, often they argue that government interference, corrupted the free market. Almost all economists would agree that if there were real highly competitive market his quote would be corrupt, but many have shown that the very greed that is produced by a free market tends to make the major players transform the market to reduce their risk and increase their power, thus producing monopoly, oligarchy, collusion, and anti-competitive practices. Greed is never harmless if it gets enough power.]
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.
