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My major problem with the world is a problem of scarcity in the midst of plenty ... of people starving while there are unused resources ... people having skills which are not being used.

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
Used
Greed
Problem
Plenty
World
Majors
People
Major
Skills
Unused
Resources
Scarcity
Poverty
Starving
Poor
Midst

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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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The Great Depression was not a sign of the failure of monetary policy or a result of the failure of the market system as was widely interpreted. It was instead a consequence of a very serious government failure, in particular a failure in the monetary authorities to do what they'd initially been set up to do.
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To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
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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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Everywhere, and at all times, economic progress has meant far more to the poor than to the rich.
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It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.
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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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The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power - we must have a dispersion of power.
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Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.
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The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
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The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success. I'm not sure that I would as of today push it as hard as I once did.
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Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
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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.
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We had much freer trade in the 19th century. We have much less globalization now than we did then.
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The real tragedy of minimum wage laws is that they are supported by well-meaning groups who want to reduce poverty. But the people who are hurt most by higher minimums are the most poverty stricken.
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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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The big problem for a democratic government - democrat with a small d - is how to hold down government spending.
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Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals - the technique of the marketplace.
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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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