Milton Friedman Quotes
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither.
Milton Friedman, 1912-2006, Nobel Laureate in Economics, Quoted in “Created Equal,” the last of the Free to Choose television series, 1990
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
As hard as it is for us to imagine today, while her husband was President of the United States, the First Lady wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column every single day with politics frequently the subject. While she usually agreed with the President, there were occasions where they seemed to not see things exactly the same. She tended to be more liberal than he. However, there were those who believed that when she criticized politicians, it was with FDR’s knowledge and blessing and she sometimes did his “dirty work.” Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the most influential people in the country—certainly more-so than any First Lady before and since.
There was a March on Washington planned for 1942. However, the leaders were persuaded to call it off as the United States was in the midst of the Second World War. The military was segregated and so were the defense plants. FDR made some concessions regarding defense jobs but discrimination was still rampant. It would be 20 years later when the March actually took place with some of the same leaders organizing it.
De Tocqueville was generally concerned about what he saw as an inherent conflict between freedom and equality. Efforts to produce equality can lead in some cases to impingements on some freedoms or rights. Unlimited free rights can produce inequality and a de facto autocracy. Even in modern times America is struggling to find a proper balance.
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.
