There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
MILTON FRIEDMANThere 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.
More Milton Friedman Quotes
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One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
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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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Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.
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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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Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.
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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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Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else.
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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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Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
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A free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.
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Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.
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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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When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
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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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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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The government doesn’t have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.
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One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.
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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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The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
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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 must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.
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Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
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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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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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Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
MILTON FRIEDMAN