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There's no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn't exist.

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
Doesn
Operating
Actual
Ideal
Compare
Ideals
Exist
System
Point
Comparing

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Not all schooling is education nor all education, schooling.
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Now that I'm 60, every morning I look in the mirror and say, I don't know who you are, stranger, but I'm gonna shave you anyway.
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When you have a time of crisis what happens depends on what ideas are floating around, and what ideas have been developed, and thought through, and are made effective.
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It all would have been much better if individuals saved for their own old age.
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It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.
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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.
Milton Friedman
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See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.
Milton Friedman
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There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.
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.
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Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist.
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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.
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One man's opportunism is another man's statesmanship.
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You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.
Milton Friedman
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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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Speeches by businessmen on social responsibility...may gain them kudos in the short run. But it helps to strengthen the already too prevalent view that the pursuit of profits is wicked.... There is one and only one social responsibility of business-to...engage in open and free competition without deception or fraud.
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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I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible. ... because I believe the big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending.
Milton Friedman
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How do you hold down government spending?
Milton Friedman
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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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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.
Milton Friedman