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You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.

Milton Friedman

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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Business Design Game Oneself Responsibility Rule
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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Hurt Law People Reality Support Tragedy
Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Government Money Save
A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Employment Law Limitation Money Person Reality Skill
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Bad Government Liberty Problem
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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Doubt Greatness Himself Mindset Myself Principle Reality
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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Fundamental Principle Simplicity Understand Writing
Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Business Government Rule
The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power – we must have a dispersion of power.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Avoid Power Problem Rule World
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 FRIEDMAN

Civilization Government Greatness Science
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Greatness Judgement Mistake Oneself Politics Result
The essential notion of a capitalist society … is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Force Liberty People Rule Society
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Creation Harm Intention Liberty Power
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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Employment Goodness Job People
Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Change Politics Reality
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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Government Oneself Profit

You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.

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You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.

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Popular Authors

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