The fall of the Berlin Wall really demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was a bad system, and what subsequently happened in the Soviet Union, that that system was a failure.
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
The true test of any scholar’s work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next twenty-five or fifty years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the text books long after I am gone.
Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.
Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.
Inflation is taxation without legislation.
There are severe limits to the good that the government can do for the economy, but there are almost no limits to the harm it can do.
There’s a smokestack on the back of every government program.
I believe the role that people like myself have played in the transformation of public opinion has been by persistently presenting a different point of view, a point of view which stresses the importance of private markets, of individual freedom, and the distorting effect of governmental policy.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.
The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power – we must have a dispersion of power.
The Great Depression in the United States was caused – I won’t say caused, was enormously intensified and made far worse than it would have been by bad monetary policy.
Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.
The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.
How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect? Freedom is a rare and delicate plant.
Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.
A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
The most unresolved problem of the day is precisely the problem that concerned the founders of this nation: how to limit the scope and power of government. Tyranny, restrictions on human freedom, come primarily from governmental restrictions that we ourselves have set up.