Milton Friedman, Nobel prize winning economist, died this week at the age of 94.

Here are some of his words of wisdom:

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.

I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.

I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.

The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.

The power to do good is also the power to do harm.

The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

But Friedman definitely had his detractors: According to an editorial in the Boston Globe today:

The consequence of Friedman's policies was to deepen social and economic inequality. Corporate CEOs could feel entitled to enormous pay packages if, in their view, the marketplace rather than a compliant board of directors, was responsible. Government was hard put to intervene on the side of those not so advantaged, because politicians who espoused the Friedman philosophy kept taxes low and skewed tax cuts in favor of the wealthy.

I do know that Arnold Schwarzenegger is a big fan of Milton Friedman so to understand Milton is a good way to make some predictions about the economic plans our Governor has for California.

Gillian Parrillo
The Sacramento Executive