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Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

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
Political
Cover
Government
Perfectly
Take
Combination
Make
Debt
Good
Spending
Taxes
Ink
Paper
Worthless
Politics
Imperfect

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What does it mean to say that government might have a responsibility? Government can't have a responsibility any more than the business can. The only entities which can have responsibilities are people.
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To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them... He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive.
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What's the difference? How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There's a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not?
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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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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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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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Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.
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The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits.
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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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Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
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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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The current oil crisis has not been produced by the oil companies. It is a result of governmental mismanagement exacerbated by the Mideast war.
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The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights.
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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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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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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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No major institution in the US has so poor a record of performance over so long a period as the Federal Reserve, yet so high a public reputation.
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Political leaders in capitalist countries who cheer the collapse of socialism in other countries continue to favor socialist solutions in their own. They know the words, but they have not learned the tune.
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My interest in political philosophy was rather casual until I met Hayek.
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Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.
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