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In a bureaucratic system, useless work drives out useful work.

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
System
Work
Bureaucratic
Drives
Useless
Useful

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We have a freer world because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the changes in China. Those two have been the main contributors to freedom in our time.
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There's no such thing as a free lunch.
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You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.
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The problem is that, in a world of floating exchange rates, as Italy was before the euro, if one country is subjected to a shock which requires it to cut wages, it cannot do so with a modern kind of control and regulation system. It is much easier to do it by letting the exchange rate change. Only one price has to change, instead of many.
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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.
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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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The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.
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The long-range sloution to high unemployment is to increase the incentive for ordinary people to save, invest, work, and employ others. We make it costly for employers to employ people we subsidize people not to go to work We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
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Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.
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There is only one social responsibility of business
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Germany's problem, in part, is that it went into the euro at the wrong exchange rate that overvalued the deutsche mark.
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What works for Sweden wouldn't work for France or Germany or Italy. In a small state, you can reach outside for many of your activities. In a homogeneous culture, they are willing to pay higher taxes in order to achieve commonly held goals. But common goals are much harder to come by in larger, more heterogeneous populations.
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The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
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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.
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The big problem for a democratic government - democrat with a small d - is how to hold down government spending.
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There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.
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Money is a very powerful thing, which you hardly notice when it goes right, but which can create havoc when it goes wrong.
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Not all schooling is education nor all education, schooling.
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Every friend of freedom... must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.
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A private enterprise system needs some measuring rod, it needs something, it needs money to make its transactions. You can't run a big complicated system through barter, through converting one commodity into another. You need a monetary system to operate. And the instability in that monetary system is devastating to the performance of the economy.
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