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With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.

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
Favors
Businessmen
General
Exceptions
Free
Notable
Comes
Businessman
Favor
Exception
Opposed
Enterprise

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What central banks can control is a base and one way they can control the base is via manipulating a particular interest rate, such as a Federal Funds rate, the overnight rate at which banks lend to one another. But they use that control to control what happens to the quantity of money. There is no disagreement.
Milton Friedman
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A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. And a society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed.
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There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.
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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.
Milton Friedman
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Indeed, a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
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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.
Milton Friedman
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The invisible hand in politics operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market.
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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.
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One man's opportunism is another man's statesmanship.
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Economic freedom is ... an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.
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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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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.
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My interest in political philosophy was rather casual until I met Hayek.
Milton Friedman
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. . I think the Adam Smith role was played in this cycle i.e. the late twentieth century collapse of socialism in which the idea of free-markets succeeded first, and then special events catalyzed a complete change of socio-political policy in countries around the world by Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.
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Saying it is one thing. Doing it is very different.
Milton Friedman
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Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.
Milton Friedman
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Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
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When a private enterprise fails, it is closed down when a government enterprise fails, it is expanded. Isn't that exactly what's been happening with drugs?
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Now that I'm 60, every morning I look in the mirror and say, I don't know who you are, stranger, but I'm gonna shave you anyway.
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The euro is going to be a big source of problems, not a source of help.
Milton Friedman