Quotations From Chairman Milton

More than three decades of wisdom from the late champion of liberty, culled from the pages of Reason.

Brian Doherty from the February 2007 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

I believe Mackey’s flat statement that “corporate philanthropy is a good thing” is flatly wrong. Consider the decision by the founders of Whole Foods to donate 5 percent of net profits to philanthropy. They were clearly within their rights in doing so. They were spending their own money.…But what reason is there to suppose that the stream of profit distributed in this way would do more good for society than investing that stream of profit in the enterprise itself or paying it out as dividends and letting the stockholders dispose of it? The practice makes sense only because of our obscene tax laws, whereby a stockholder can make a larger gift for a given after-tax cost if the corporation makes the gift on his behalf than if he makes the gift directly. That is a good reason for eliminating the corporate tax or for eliminating the deductibility of corporate charity, but it is not a justification for corporate charity.

From “The Father of Modern School Reform,” December 2005, an interview conducted by Nick Gillespie:

We have been going from a rural or quasi-rural society to an aristocratic society. There’s no doubt that in recent years the upper end of the income scale has enjoyed a much larger increase in income and wealth than the lower end.

I want [education] vouchers to be…available to everyone. They should contain few or no restrictions on how they can be used. We need a system in which the government says to every parent: “Here is a piece of paper you can use for the educational purposes of your child. It will cover the full cost per student at a government school. It is worth X dollars towards the cost of educational services that you purchase from parochial schools, private for-profit schools, private nonprofit schools, or other purveyors of educational services. You may add from your own funds to the voucher if you wish to and can afford to.”

Empowering parents would generate a competitive education market, which would lead to a burst of innovation and improvement, as competition has done in so many other areas. There’s nothing that would do so much to avoid the danger of a two-tiered society, of a class-based society. And there’s nothing that would do so much to ensure a skilled and educated work force.

From “Can We Bank on the Federal Reserve?,” November 2006, a roundtable that included the last interview Friedman granted to Reason, conducted by Brian Doherty:

I do not think you or I can say what the right savings rate is or should be. There’s nothing wrong with a person, family, or country saying, “We have high enough income. We don’t need more. We’re going to spend it all.” We can have a perfectly prosperous and active economy along those lines. I don’t think it’s helpful to ask, “Is this rate right or wrong?” Instead we should ask, “Have we adopted polices that reduce incentives to save?”

The U.S. economy is capable of very good growth provided the government keeps its hands off. Unfortunately, there’s a strong propensity for the government to do things that are harmful rather than helpful. For example, Sarbanes-Oxley [the post-Enron law attempting to curb accounting fraud] is very unfortunate. It tells every entrepreneur in America: Don’t take risks. That’s not what we want. The function of the entrepreneur is to take risks, and if he’s forced not to take risks and to spend on accountants rather than products, the economy is not going to expand or grow.