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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
Better
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More quotes by Milton Friedman

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The government doesn't have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.
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A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.
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Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative -- the building blocks of success throughout our society.
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Rich people are the experimental ground for every new development. The nature of progress is that what begins as a luxury for the rich becomes a necessity for the poor as it's developed and passed on.
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Whenever you try to do good with someone else's money, you are committed to using force. How can you do good with somebody else's money, unless you first take it away from them? The only way you can take it away from them is the threat of force: you have a policeman, tax collector, who comes and takes it from them.
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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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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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What kind of society isn't structured on greed?
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China's productive system draws upon the other East Asian countries to a great extent. The volume of trade is much larger than the net amount being exported from China. China needs substantial reserves to finance all that.
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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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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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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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Not all schooling is education nor all education, schooling.
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The history of mankind is the history of money losing value.
Milton Friedman
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Governments never learn. Only people learn.
Milton Friedman
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I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government.
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To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a monetary union, putting out a fiat currency, composed of independent states.
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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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A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
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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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