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One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

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
Judging
April
Program
Intentions
Policy
Programs
Mistake
Policies
Results
Economics
Politics
Judge
Rather
Intention
Great
Mistakes

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If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.
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The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits.
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I am convinced that the minimum-wage law is the most anti-Negro law on our statute books in its effect, not its intent.
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Rapid increases in the quantity of money produce inflation. Sharp decreases produce depression.
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There's no such thing as a free lunch.
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You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.
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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?
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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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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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The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good.
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The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.
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Economists may not know how to run the economy, but they know how to create shortages or gluts simply by regulating prices below the market, or artificially supporting them from above.
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In a free society, it is hard for 'good' people to do 'good', but that is a small price to pay for making it hard for 'evil' people to do 'evil', especially since one man's good is another's evil
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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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Germany has a very able and productive workforce. It has high-quality products that are valued all over the world. It has every opportunity to be a productive, growing state. It just has to give its entrepreneurs a chance. It has to let them make money, hire and fire, and act like entrepreneurs.
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How do you hold down government spending?
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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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If China don't free up the political side, its economic growth will come to an end - while it is still at a very low level.
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By encouraging men to spy and report on one another, by making it in the private interest of large numbers of citizens to evade the controls, and by making actions illegal that are in the public interest, the controls undermine individual morality.
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Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist.
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