"This leads to my next myth—the myth that government can spend money at nobody’s expense. What was really involved in that last story was that somehow the local people do not pay out the money coming down from Washington somebody else does. Of course, the truth is that the money makes a round trip between Florida and Washington, and there is a discount taken off for cash as it passes through Washington. Some of you may remember that wonderful description of government by the French economist, Frederic Bastiat, who said that government is that fiction whereby everybody believes that he can live at the expense of everybody else."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesJews from the United StatesPeople from New York CityAgnostics from the United StatesEconomists from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
“Economic Myths and Public Opinion”, The Alternative: An American Spectator, vol. 9, no. 4, (January 1976) pp. 5-9
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Milton Friedman
1912 – 2006
US-amerikanischer Ökonom und Nobelpreisträger
216 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Milton Friedman →
Related Quotes
"Now, when anybody starts talking about this [an all-volunteer force] he immediately shifts language. My army is 'volu…"
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more r…"
"The construction of hypotheses is a creative act of inspiration, intuition, invention; its essence is the vision of s…"
"I have no right to coerce someone else, because I cannot be sure that I'm right and he is wrong."
"Over the period covered by these data, a drastic change has occurred in the responsibilities undertaken by the state …"
"I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm f…"
"The price system works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time. We never realize how we…"
"A largely parallel example involving human behavior has been used elsewhere by Savage and me. Consider the problem of…"
"If we are to use effectively these abstract models and this descriptive material, we must have a comparable explorati…"
"Make politics an avocation, not a vocation."