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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.

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
People
Single
Freer
System
Proposition
Poor
Propositions
Voice
Speaks
History
Exception
Speak
Compare
Better
Evidence
Like
Ordinary

More quotes by Milton Friedman

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The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books.
Milton Friedman
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The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Milton Friedman
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How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect? Freedom is a rare and delicate plant.
Milton Friedman
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Saying it is one thing. Doing it is very different.
Milton Friedman
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Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition.
Milton Friedman
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The future of private enterprise capitalism is also the future of a free society. There is no possibility of having a politically free society unless the major part of its economic resources are operated under a capitalistic private enterprise system.
Milton Friedman
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There is one and only one social responsibility of business - to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.
Milton Friedman
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What does it mean to say that government might have a responsibility? Government can't have a responsibility any more than the business can. The only entities which can have responsibilities are people.
Milton Friedman
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Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.
Milton Friedman
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I would say that in this world, the greatest source of inequality has been special privileges granted by government.
Milton Friedman
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Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.
Milton Friedman
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To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served.
Milton Friedman
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The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can't do that.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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Germany cannot get out of the euro. What it has to do, therefore, is make the economy more flexible - to eliminate the restrictions on prices, on wages and on employment in short, the regulations that keep 10 percent of the German workforce unemployed.
Milton Friedman
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We had much freer trade in the 19th century. We have much less globalization now than we did then.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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One man's opportunism is another man's statesmanship.
Milton Friedman
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Rapid increases in the quantity of money produce inflation. Sharp decreases produce depression.
Milton Friedman
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The Founding Fathers envisioned a federal government that trusts its people with their money and freedom, outlining this limited, non-intrusive federal government in...the Constitution, leaving the other powers to people...or to the states.
Milton Friedman