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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.

Milton Friedman

The excuse for the destruction of liberty is always the plea of necessary ‘ that there is no alternative.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Choice Destruction Liberty Necessary
One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Drug Market Oneself Role
The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Destruction Hands Politics Power
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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Direction Government Improvement Philosophy
Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters’ own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Dream Money Politics Technique Vote
Anything that government can do, private enterprise can do for half the cost.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Government Price
You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Business Difference Freedom Yourself
The government doesn’t have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Genrosity Government Money Power
Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Absence Freedom Men Politics
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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Depression Employment Government Greatness Management
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Creation Harm Intention Liberty Power
Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Business Government Rule
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
There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Goodness Harm Intention Liberty
There’s no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn’t exist.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Existence Government Ideal Rule
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Bad Government Liberty Problem

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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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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Popular Authors

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