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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.

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
Power
Give
Government
Take
Giving
Doesn
Others
Money

More quotes by Milton Friedman

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I think there is universal agreement within the economics profession that the decline - the sharp decline in the quantity of money played a very major role in producing the Great Depression.
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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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Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.
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And where are you going to get these angels who are going to run society for us?
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The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
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The broader and more influential organisations of businessmen have acted to undermine the basic foundation of the free market system they purport to represent and defend.
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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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A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
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Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
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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.
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The big problem for a democratic government - democrat with a small d - is how to hold down government spending.
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.
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If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.
Milton Friedman
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Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
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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The euro is going to be a big source of problems, not a source of help.
Milton Friedman
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How can thinking people believe that a government that cannot deliver the mail can deliver gas better than Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, and the rest?
Milton Friedman
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The Great Depression was not a sign of the failure of monetary policy or a result of the failure of the market system as was widely interpreted. It was instead a consequence of a very serious government failure, in particular a failure in the monetary authorities to do what they'd initially been set up to do.
Milton Friedman