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If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

Milton Friedman

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Milton Friedman
Age: 94 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 31
Died: 2006
Died: November 16
Economist
Essayist
Statistician
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Milton Fridman
Liberty
Economist
Politics
Charge
Political
Federal
Government
Libertarian
Sahara
Years
Sand
Federalism
Socialism
Charging
Desert
Shortage
Economics
Libertarianism

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The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.
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There's no such thing as a free lunch.
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The big issue is whether the United States will succeed in its venture of reshaping the Middle East. It is not clear to me that using military force is the way to do it. We should not have gone into Iraq. But we have.
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The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.
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There is not a line in 'The Wealth of Nations' that is not still applicable to this day.
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We measure poverty by what I believe is a very, very crude concept. We actually measure poverty by trying to get some kind of an estimate of the minimum expenditures on food that are required to maintain health, multiplying that number by three, and saying that's the level of poverty. And it's a very crude, inaccurate arrangement.
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To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a monetary union, putting out a fiat currency, composed of independent states.
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Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.
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The facts never speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted in terms of some understanding of where they come from and what the relation between them is.
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Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative -- the building blocks of success throughout our society.
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Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgment...In short, positive economics is or can be an objective science.
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Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.
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No central banker would disagree with the proposition that inflation is primarily a monetary phenomenon. Not one of them will disagree that every inflation has been accompanied by a rapid increase in the quantity of money and every deflation by a decline in the quantity of money.
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In a bureaucratic system, useless work drives out useful work.
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The Federal Reserve the privately owned U.S. central bank definitely caused The Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one third from 1929 to 1933.
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There's no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn't exist.
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The most unresolved problem of the day is precisely the problem that concerned the founders of this nation: how to limit the scope and power of government. Tyranny, restrictions on human freedom, come primarily from governmental restrictions that we ourselves have set up.
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They think that the cure to big government is to have bigger government... the only effective cure is to reduce the scope of government - get government out of the business.
Milton Friedman
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What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.
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How did we make the transition from using wood to using coal, from using coal to using oil, from using oil to using natural gas? How in God's name did we make that transition without a Federal Energy Agency?
Milton Friedman