Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.
MILTON FRIEDMANThe great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
More Milton Friedman Quotes
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Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery.
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Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
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The government doesn’t have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.
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The growing role that the government has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only the enormous waste of taxpayers money but also to a far poorer educational system.
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With respect to teachers’ salaries …. Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority.
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See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That’s literally true.
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When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union – like public housing in the United States – look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.
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What makes it [economics] most fascinating is that its fundamental principles are so simple that they can be written on one page, that anyone can understand them, and yet very few do.
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I would say that in this world, the greatest source of inequality has been special privileges granted by government.
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With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.
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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.
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You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.
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Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else.
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The excuse for the destruction of liberty is always the plea of necessary ‘ that there is no alternative.
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There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
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Anything that government can do, private enterprise can do for half the cost.
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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.
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Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.
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You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.
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One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.
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Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised.
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We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
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You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.
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The essential notion of a capitalist society … is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.
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Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.
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Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?
MILTON FRIEDMAN