The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
MILTON FRIEDMANYou cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.
More Milton Friedman Quotes
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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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The power to do good is also the power to do harm.
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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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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’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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With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.
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Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.
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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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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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We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
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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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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
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If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.
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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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You know there are very few Marxists left in the world they’re all in American universities.
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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 government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
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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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Anything that government can do, private enterprise can do for half the cost.
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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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The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn’t do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn’t do a thing for them.
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Governments never learn. Only people learn.
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There’s no doubt in my mind that Ronald Reagan was by far the greatest. Because he had real principles and he stuck by them. He made clear what he was going to do, and he did it. He didn’t back down.
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One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.
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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.
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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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN