Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.
Interpretation
Friedman critiques the redundancy of government agencies by humorously suggesting that any random three letters could represent unnecessary bureaucracy.
In this quote, Milton Friedman uses humor and irony to highlight the proliferation of federal agencies that may not serve a significant purpose. He implies that the arbitrary nature of bureaucratic designations suggests a lack of efficacy and calls into question the necessity of so many government institutions, inviting reflection on the efficiency of government operations.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about government efficiency in a political debate.
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.
We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.
If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.
When we speak of our virtues we are competitors, when we confess our sins we become brothers.
Except a man be born again, he will wish one day he had never been born at all.
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