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 FRIEDMANI 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.
More Milton Friedman Quotes
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Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.
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You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.
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You know there are very few Marxists left in the world they’re all in American universities.
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The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits.
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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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One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.
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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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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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A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.
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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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There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
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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 power to do good is also the power to do harm.
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The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
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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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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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Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else.
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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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Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
MILTON FRIEDMAN