The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
MILTON FRIEDMANA society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
More Milton Friedman Quotes
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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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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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Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.
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The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can’t do that.
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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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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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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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There are severe limits to the good that the government can do for the economy, but there are almost no limits to the harm it can do.
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Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters’ own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
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One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
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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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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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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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Every person shall be free to do good at his own expense.
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The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
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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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The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
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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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Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.
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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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Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
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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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The excuse for the destruction of liberty is always the plea of necessary ‘ that there is no alternative.
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Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.
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Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.
MILTON FRIEDMAN