Best Quotes by Milton Friedman (Top 10)
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A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
Milton Friedman
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One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
Milton Friedman
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Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government— in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.
Milton Friedman
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The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.
Milton Friedman
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Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
Milton Friedman
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman
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I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.
Milton Friedman
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Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
Milton Friedman
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Governments never learn. Only people learn.
Milton Friedman
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Society doesn't have values. People have values.
Milton Friedman
More Milton Friedman Quotes
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When a man spends his own money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about how much he spends and how he spends it. When a man spends his own money to buy something for someone else, he is still very careful about how much he spends, but somewhat less what he spends it on. When a man spends someone else's money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about what he buys, but doesn't care at all how much he spends. And when a man spends someone else's money on someone else, he does't care how much he spends or what he spends it on. And that's government for you.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
Milton Friedman
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If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
Milton Friedman
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The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Milton Friedman
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We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
Milton Friedman
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Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.
Milton Friedman
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Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
Milton Friedman
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The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
Milton Friedman
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Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
Milton Friedman
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Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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Inflation is taxation without legislation.
Milton Friedman
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Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
Milton Friedman
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History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.
Milton Friedman
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The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
Milton Friedman