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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.

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
Economic
Cooperation
Moral
Libertarian
Values
Triumph
Force
Intention
Depart
Trying
Whenever
Triumphs
Good
Using
Voluntary
Value
Libertarianism
Liberty
Intentions

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The evidence of history speaks with a single voice. I do not know any exception to the proposition that if you compare like with like, the freer the system, the better off the ordinary poor people have been.
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It is true that a competitive market is not the whole of society. A great deal depends on the qualities of the population and the nation in how they organize the non-market aspects of society.
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The argument for collectivism is simple free market is not.
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How do you hold down government spending?
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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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Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold.
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I think there is universal agreement within the economics profession that the decline - the sharp decline in the quantity of money played a very major role in producing the Great Depression.
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Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.
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The central banks cannot control interest rates. That's a mistake. They can control a particular rate, such as the Federal Funds rate, if they want to, but they can't control interest rates.
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See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.
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Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.
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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.
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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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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.
Milton Friedman
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A society that puts equality — in the sense of equality of outcome — ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.
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I know of no severe depression, in any country or any time, that was not accompanied by a sharp decline in the stock of money, and equally of no sharp decline in the stock of money that was not accompanied by a severe depression.
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[Trade licensing] almost inevitably becomes a tool in the hands of a special producer group to maintain a monopoly position at the expense of the rest of the public. There is no way to avoid this result.
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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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Germany's problem, in part, is that it went into the euro at the wrong exchange rate that overvalued the deutsche mark.
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Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of drug-related crimes, but also on the belief that relieving our police and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drug use will enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to combating other forms of crime.
Milton Friedman