Milton Friedman Quotes
When something goes wrong, the natural tendency is to say, "By God, we need to pass a law and do something."
He was discussing “Stand Your Ground Laws” which were enacted to solve one problem, but then effected many other things negatively. The law, once passed, is the law regardless of whether it has adverse consequences that the legislators never anticipated. This is one of the reasons that drafting legislation is such a difficult skill.
See {630440} for an earlier English human relations statement of the idea.
Virtually every scientist and most laymen realized that the air quality of London was getting worse and worse. But the politicians did nothing until in 1952, it became so bad that people dies, traffic came to a standstill, business had to shut down and the city was just about paralyzed. Then they finally acted and improved the air quality immensely.
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.
