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There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.

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
Program
Government
Back
Every

More quotes by Milton Friedman

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Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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The Federal Reserve the privately owned U.S. central bank definitely caused The Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one third from 1929 to 1933.
Milton Friedman
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You can only make money if you buy a product, whatever it is - maybe a currency, maybe wheat and maybe something else - at a relatively low price and sell it at a higher price than you buy it at. There's no other way to make money.
Milton Friedman
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When you have a time of crisis what happens depends on what ideas are floating around, and what ideas have been developed, and thought through, and are made effective.
Milton Friedman
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I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.
Milton Friedman
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When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
Milton Friedman
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Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
Milton Friedman
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The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power - we must have a dispersion of power.
Milton Friedman
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The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them.
Milton Friedman
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Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
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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Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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I am a limited-government libertarian.
Milton Friedman
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The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
Milton Friedman
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What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman
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Making prohibition work is like making water run uphill it's against nature.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman