When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
MILTON FRIEDMANOne role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.
More Milton Friedman Quotes
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There is one and only one responsibility of business: to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.
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Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?
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The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
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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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I am a libertarian with a small “l” and a Republican with a capital “R”. And I am a Republican with a capital “R” on grounds of expediency, not on principle.
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Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
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Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
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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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A free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.
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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 no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn’t exist.
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I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.
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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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One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
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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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If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.
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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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Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.
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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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Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
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The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
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Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.
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Governments never learn. Only people learn.
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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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There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
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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