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.
MILTON FRIEDMANWe have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
More Milton Friedman Quotes
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If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.
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There are severe limits to the good that the government can do for the economy, but there are almost no limits to the harm it can do.
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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.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
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With respect to teachers’ salaries …. Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority.
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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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Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?
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You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.
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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.
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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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The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
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You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.
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Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
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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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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