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.
MILTON FRIEDMANNothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
More Milton Friedman Quotes
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The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power – we must have a dispersion of power.
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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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There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
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If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don’t be surprised if you get unemployment.
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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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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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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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With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.
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You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.
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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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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
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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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If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.
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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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You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.
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Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
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Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
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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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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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There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
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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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Society doesn’t have values. People have values.
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The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
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Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.
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Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
MILTON FRIEDMAN