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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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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
Plans
Frankenstein
Becoming
Establish
Create
Freedom
Delicate
Keep
Rare
Government
Destroy
Plant
Protect

More quotes by 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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In the current world, with the skills needed, dropouts [like no secondary education] are condemned to being members of the underclass. In my view, this is a fault of the American school system, which is a government monopoly.
Milton Friedman
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Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.
Milton Friedman
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When a private enterprise fails, it is closed down when a government enterprise fails, it is expanded. Isn't that exactly what's been happening with drugs?
Milton Friedman
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It doesn't worry me a bit that China and Japan hold so much US debt. In a way, it seems foolish for them to do it because they get lower returns than they might elsewhere. But that is their business.
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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No central banker would disagree with the proposition that inflation is primarily a monetary phenomenon. Not one of them will disagree that every inflation has been accompanied by a rapid increase in the quantity of money and every deflation by a decline in the quantity of money.
Milton Friedman
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The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
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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The price works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time.
Milton Friedman
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The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good.
Milton Friedman
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The Internet moves us closer to perfect information on markets. Individuals and companies alike can buy and sell across borders and jurisdictions wherever they find the best match of supply and demand.
Milton Friedman
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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.
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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In a bureaucratic system, useless work drives out useful work.
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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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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Cutting government spending and government intrusion in the economy will almost surely involve immediate gain for the many, short-term pain for the few, and long-term gain for all.
Milton Friedman
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. . I think the Adam Smith role was played in this cycle i.e. the late twentieth century collapse of socialism in which the idea of free-markets succeeded first, and then special events catalyzed a complete change of socio-political policy in countries around the world by Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.
Milton Friedman