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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.

Milton Friedman

The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Company Money Profit Responsibility
The power to do good is also the power to do harm.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Choice Goodness Harm Power
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
Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That’s not a statement, it’s a definition.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Employment Government Limitation Money
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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Drug Government Protection See True War
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Bad Government Liberty Problem
Society doesn’t have values. People have values.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

People Society Value
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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Government Harm Limitation
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 FRIEDMAN

Forget Freedom Limitation Live Man Misery Politics Time
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
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
If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Law Rule Talk Understand Yourself
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
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.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Exercise Freedom Liberty People Politics Power
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
MILTON FRIEDMAN

Argument Belief Freedom Liberty
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

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 Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Milton Friedman Quotes