The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
MILTON FRIEDMANSince the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters’ own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
More Milton Friedman Quotes
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You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.
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Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.
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In the 1960s, The National Education Association changed its character. The NEA changed into a union. And from that point on you can see deterioration in the quality of schooling in the United States.
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You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.
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If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.
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Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
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If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don’t be surprised if you get unemployment.
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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.
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There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
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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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Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
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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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Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
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Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
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A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
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The real tragedy of minimum wage laws is that they are supported by well-meaning groups who want to reduce poverty. But the people who are hurt most by higher minimums are the most poverty stricken.
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There’s no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn’t exist.
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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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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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The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power – we must have a dispersion of power.
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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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There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
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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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Governments never learn. Only people learn.
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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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You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.
MILTON FRIEDMAN