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There’s no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn’t exist.

Milton Friedman

The growing role that the government has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only the enormous waste of taxpayers money but also to a far poorer educational system.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Education Government Money Play Poor Role Waste
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
A free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Country Freedom Himself Patriot
If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Law Rule Talk Understand Yourself
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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Freedom Government Greatness Hate Religious
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Equality Freedom Rule Society
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Government Liberty Permenent
If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don’t be surprised if you get unemployment.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Employment Pay People Yourself
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
The power to do good is also the power to do harm.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

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

Choice Destruction Liberty Necessary
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
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Creation Harm Intention Liberty Power
We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Law Liberty Politics Society
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 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

There’s no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn’t exist.

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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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