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 FRIEDMANYou cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.
More Milton Friedman Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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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Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.
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If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.
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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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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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You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.
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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.
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We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
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There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
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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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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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN