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The most unresolved problem of the day is precisely the problem that concerned the founders of this nation: how to limit the scope and power of government. Tyranny, restrictions on human freedom, come primarily from governmental restrictions that we ourselves have set up.

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
Freedom
Founders
Power
Precisely
Problem
Limit
Unresolved
Government
Tyranny
Governmental
Human
Limits
Restrictions
Humans
Concerned
Restriction
Come
Nation
Primarily
Nations
Scope

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The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.
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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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The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
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Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.
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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.
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Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold.
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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.
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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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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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If you look at the balance sheet, the US is heavily in debt. If you look at the income account - the amount of interest the US pays abroad - it is almost exactly equal to the amount of interest that it receives from abroad. American assets held abroad are earning a higher rate of return than foreign assets held here.
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Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.
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In a free society, it is hard for 'good' people to do 'good', but that is a small price to pay for making it hard for 'evil' people to do 'evil', especially since one man's good is another's evil
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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.
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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.
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Rapid increases in the quantity of money produce inflation. Sharp decreases produce depression.
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I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.
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My interest in political philosophy was rather casual until I met Hayek.
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Making prohibition work is like making water run uphill it's against nature.
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Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself ... Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.
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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.
Milton Friedman