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.
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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Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?
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You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.
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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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Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
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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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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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Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.
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I 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.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
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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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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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Governments never learn. Only people learn.
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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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Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
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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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Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.
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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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When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
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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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The growing role that the government has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only the enormous waste of taxpayers money but also to a far poorer educational system.
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Society doesn’t have values. People have values.
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You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.
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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 power to do good is also the power to do harm.
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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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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