Anything that government can do, private enterprise can do for half the cost.
MILTON FRIEDMANThe 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.
More Milton Friedman Quotes
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Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
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The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
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When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
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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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There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
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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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Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
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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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The word ‘free’ is used three times in the Declaration of Independence and once in the First Amendment to the Constitution, along with ‘freedom.’ The word ‘fair’ is not used in either of our founding documents.
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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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN -
The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power – we must have a dispersion of power.
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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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Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else.
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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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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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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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Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
MILTON FRIEDMAN -
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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN -
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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You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.
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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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Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.
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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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Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That’s not a statement, it’s a definition.
MILTON FRIEDMAN