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 FRIEDMANThe 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.
More Milton Friedman Quotes
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Every person shall be free to do good at his own expense.
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The essential notion of a capitalist society … is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
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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.
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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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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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Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.
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Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That’s not a statement, it’s a definition.
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Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
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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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Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters’ own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
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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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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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Governments never learn. Only people learn.
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Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.
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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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The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
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There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
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One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.
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Society doesn’t have values. People have values.
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The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn’t do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn’t do a thing for them.
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If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.
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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.
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The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
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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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There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
MILTON FRIEDMAN