Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of individual protection from government interference rather than relying solely on governmental oversight for consumer safety.
Milton Friedman highlights a critical perspective on the relationship between consumers and government. While many believe that consumers need protection from corporations through government regulation, Friedman argues that the greater concern is the potential for government itself to harm consumers through overreach and excessive regulation. This viewpoint suggests that consumer freedom and autonomy should be prioritized over governmental control, encouraging a discussion about the balance of power between individuals and the state.
In practice
In a discussion about government regulations during a town hall meeting.
The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.
Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.
There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.
There is one and only one social responsibility of business - to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.
The great danger to the consumer is the monopoly -whether private or governmental. His most effective protection is free competition at home and free trade throughout the world. The consumer is protected from being exploited by one seller by the existence of another seller from whom he can buy and who is eager to sell to him. Alternative sources of supply protect the consumer far more effectively than all the Ralph Naders of the world.
The strongest argument for free enterprise is that it prevents anybody from having too much power. Whether that person is a government official, a trade union official, or a business executive. If forces them to put up or shut up. They either have to deliver the goods, produce something that people are willing to pay for, are willing to buy, or else they have to go into a different business.
I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.
We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists
I detest the niqab and the burka for their erasure of women and for dangerously equating piety with that disappearance - the less of you I can see, the closer you must be to God.
We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.
We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.
Though an atom is invisible, unthinkable, yet in it are the whole power and potency of the universe.
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