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Milton Friedman on capitalism and socialism

Friedman on why he held that a socialist society cannot also guarantee individual freedom.

21 passages in the archive14 checked against the source7 not yet checked
  1. In 1945–46, intellectual opinion was almost entirely collectivist. But practice was free market. Government was spending something like 20–25 percent of national income. But the ideas of people were all for more government. And so from 1945 to 1980, you had a period of galloping socialism.
    The Romance of Economics
    Interview, 2006, Interview by Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal; reprinted in Hoover Digest 2006 No. 4
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  2. After the fall of communism, everybody in the world agreed that socialism was a failure. Everybody in the world, more or less, agreed that capitalism was a success. And every capitalist country in the world apparently deduced from that what the West needed was more socialism.
    Milton Friedman: The Rise of Socialism is Absurd and There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
    Speech, 1993
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  3. Airlines have had no difficulty in acquiring the planes and personnel to handle the increased traffic produced by deregulation. What has been the bottleneck? Airports. Why? Because they are government owned and operated.
    We Have Socialism, Q.E.D.
    Column, 1989, The New York Times, December 31, 1989, Section 4, p. 11
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  4. Believers in aristocracy and socialism share a faith in centralized rule, in rule by command rather than by voluntary cooperation.
    Free to Choose
    Book, 1980, Ch. 4 “Cradle to Grave”, p. 97
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  5. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collectivist doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means.
    A Friedman Doctrine—The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits
    Column, 1970, The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970, Section SM, p. 17
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  6. Major premise: Socialism is a failure. Even lifelong Communists now accept this proposition. Wherever socialism has been tried, it has proved unable to deliver the goods, either in the material form of a high standard of living or in the immaterial form of human freedom.
    We Have Socialism, Q.E.D.
    Column, 1989, The New York Times, December 31, 1989, Section 4, p. 11
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  7. But as a matter of practical experience, no complicated society can be run solely on the command principle. It’s just impossible. And therefore, in one sense, the market is essential. There’s no way of avoiding it.
    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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  8. It is true that the normal condition of mankind is tyranny and misery. We've escaped. We've been extraordinarily fortunate to escape into an island of freedom and prosperity. If we do not maintain that island of freedom and prosperity, if we do not maintain the essential features of the society which made that freedom and prosperity possible, there isn't a wide range of alternatives. We go to misery and tyranny to the normal state of mankind.
    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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  9. In the past century a myth has grown up that free market capitalism—equality of opportunity as we have interpreted that term—increases such inequalities, that it is a system under which the rich exploit the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wherever the free market has been permitted to operate, wherever anything approaching equality of opportunity has existed, the ordinary man has been able to attain levels of living never dreamed of before. Nowhere is the gap between rich and poor wider, nowhere are the rich richer and the poor poorer, than in those societies that do not permit the free market to operate.
    Free to Choose
    Book, 1980, Ch. 5 “Created Equal”, p. 146
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  10. In fact they are—or would be if they or any one else took them seriously—preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.
    A Friedman Doctrine—The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits
    Column, 1970, The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970, Section SM, p. 17
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  11. We preach free enterprise to the newly freed communist countries. We tell them to privatize, privatize, privatize, while we socialize, socialize, socialize.
    Why Government Is the Problem
    Journal article, 1993, Hoover Institution Press, Essays in Public Policy no. 39, p. 12
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  12. Re vouchers—and I’m now speaking of schooling vouchers—schooling is, next only to national defense, the largest socialist enterprise in the United States. And it is clearly as much of a failure as the socialist enterprises in Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia or East Germany.
    Say 'No' to Intolerance
    Speech, 1991, Liberty, vol. 4, no. 6 (July 1991), p. 20
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  13. [A] society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom.
    Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy: A Symposium
    Column, 1978, Commentary
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  14. 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)
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  15. Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist.
    We Have Socialism, Q.E.D.
    Column, 1989, The New York Times, December 31, 1989, Section 4, p. 11
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  16. I think it is only because capitalism has proved so enormously more efficient than alternative methods that it has survived at all. ( … ) I'm not sure capitalism is the right word. There is a sense in which every society is capitalist. The Soviet Union was capitalist, but it was state capitalism. Latin American societies in the past have been capitalist, but it has been oligarchic capitalism. So what we really need to talk about is not capitalism but free market or competitive capitalism which is the system that we would like to have adopted, not just capitalism.
    Reflections on the Great Depression
    Interview, 2002
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  17. I summarized my impressions by saying that I thought that the best way to understand Israel was to recognize that two Jewish traditions were at war with one another in Israel. One of them was a very recent tradition, a tradition of 100 to 150 years old. That’s the tradition of socialism. … The other tradition, I said, was a tradition that was at least 2,000 years old. It was a tradition that had arisen during the diaspora and as a result of the diaspora. It was a tradition of how you get around government regulations, how you find chinks in controls, how you find those areas in which the free market operates and makes the most of them.
    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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  18. What country in the world today engages in the most extreme anti-Semitic persecution? The Soviet Union. It’s not an accident, because if you have a society with concentrated power, if you have a collectivist society, it’s going to be in a position to exercise the preferences and prejudices of its rulers. Moreover, it’s going to have an incentive to do so, because it’s going to need a scapegoat and it will choose some group like the Jews or the blacks to be the scapegoat. New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980
    Interview with Milton Friedman
    Interview, 1973, Playboy
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  19. What is socialism? In its purest form, socialism is government ownership and control of the means of production. Ownership of anything implies the right to the income produced by that thing.
    We Have Socialism, Q.E.D.
    Column, 1989, The New York Times, December 31, 1989, Section 4, p. 11
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  20. What kind of society isn’t structured on greed? … So the problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm. It seems to me that the great virtue of capitalism is that it’s that kind of system. Because under capitalism, the power of any one individual over his fellow man is relatively small.
    Interview with Milton Friedman
    Interview, 1973, Playboy
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  21. There is no doubt who won the intellectual argument. There is no doubt that the received intellectual opinion of the world today is much less favorable towards central planning and controls than it was in 1947. What's much more dubious is who won the practical argument. The world is more socialist today than it was in 1947. Government spending in almost every Western country is higher today than it was in 1947, as a fraction of income, not simply in dollars.
    Commanding Heights: Milton Friedman interview
    Interview, 2000, PBS, “Where We Stand Today,” interview conducted October 1, 2000
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