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They think that the cure to big government is to have bigger government... the only effective cure is to reduce the scope of government - get government out of the business.

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
Effective
Bigger
Bigs
Business
Government
Scope
Think
Reduce
Thinking
Cure
Cures

More quotes by Milton Friedman

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What central banks can control is a base and one way they can control the base is via manipulating a particular interest rate, such as a Federal Funds rate, the overnight rate at which banks lend to one another. But they use that control to control what happens to the quantity of money. There is no disagreement.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
Milton Friedman
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A society that puts equality — in the sense of equality of outcome — ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash, a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B, without A knowing B or B knowing A.
Milton Friedman
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It all would have been much better if individuals saved for their own old age.
Milton Friedman
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So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free-enterprise system.
Milton Friedman
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Is there some society you know of that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed?
Milton Friedman
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Inflation is taxation without legislation.
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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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
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Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.
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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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 Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.
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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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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Governments never learn. Only people learn.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman