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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.

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
Like
United
Nobody
Construction
Political
Building
Soviet
Two
Public
Union
Decrepit
States
Everybody
Unions
Owns
Look
Politics
Condition
Housing
Looks
Year
Economics
Buildings
Something
Within
Direct
Maintaining
Years
Interest
Conditions
Improving

More quotes by Milton Friedman

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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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As a nation, we have been responsible for the murder of literally hundreds of thousands of people at home and abroad by fighting a war that should never have been started and can be won, if at all, only by converting the United States into a police state.
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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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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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The problem is that, in a world of floating exchange rates, as Italy was before the euro, if one country is subjected to a shock which requires it to cut wages, it cannot do so with a modern kind of control and regulation system. It is much easier to do it by letting the exchange rate change. Only one price has to change, instead of many.
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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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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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There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.
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Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself ... Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.
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Complete free trade is not politically feasible. Why? Because it's only in the general interest and in no one's special interest.
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Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.
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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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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 only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
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History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
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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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It all would have been much better if individuals saved for their own old age.
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Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse - for both the addict and the rest of us.
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The euro is going to be a big source of problems, not a source of help.
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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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