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Milton Friedman on Money, banking, and the gold standard

True, money is only a machine, but it is an extraordinarily efficient machine. ( … ) But money has one feature that these other machines do not share. Because it is so pervasive, when it gets out of order, it throws a monkey wrench into the operation of all the other machines.
The Role of Monetary Policy
Journal article, 1968, American Economic Review 58, no. 1 (March 1968), pp. 1–17; reprinted in the House Banking and Currency Committee’s 1968 Compendium on Monetary Policy Guidelines and Federal Reserve Structure, pp. 214–224, p. 221 of the 1968 House reprint
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  1. Equally important, you cannot spend somebody else's money unless you first get it. … So the concept of doing good with somebody else's money has force or coercion built into it as an essential feature.
    The Open Mind
    Interview, 1977, The Open Mind, hosted by Richard Heffner, Episode “A Nobel Laureate on the American Economy” (May 3, 1977)
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  2. Fundamentally, the Soviet Union is a market economy, but it’s a distorted market economy, because the extraordinarily great role of government forces the market into channels which are not efficient and not effective, and so much of its power is wasted in simply overcoming the bureaucratic mess of the government. That’s why the Soviet Union has such a low standard of life.
    The Open Mind
    Interview, 1977, The Open Mind, hosted by Richard Heffner, Episode “A Nobel Laureate on the American Economy” (May 3, 1977)
    Checked against the sourceWatch it
  3. The only way you could get the inflation down was by having monetary contraction. There was no way you could do that without having a temporary recession. The great error in the earlier period had been that whenever there was a little contraction there was a tendency to expand the money supply rapidly in order to avoid unemployment. That stop-and-go policy was really what bedeviled the Fed during the '60s and '70s.
    Commanding Heights: Milton Friedman interview
    Interview, 2000, PBS, “On Ronald Reagan,” interview conducted October 1, 2000
    Checked against the sourceRead the transcript

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