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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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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
Principles
Written
Anyone
Fascinating
Simple
Page
Understand
Fundamental
Makes
Fundamentals
Economics
Pages

More quotes by Milton Friedman

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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.
Milton Friedman
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Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.
Milton Friedman
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It doesn't worry me a bit that China and Japan hold so much US debt. In a way, it seems foolish for them to do it because they get lower returns than they might elsewhere. But that is their business.
Milton Friedman
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The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
Milton Friedman
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The only reason free markets have a ghost of a chance is that they are so much more efficient than any other form of organization.
Milton Friedman
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Complete free trade is not politically feasible. Why? Because it's only in the general interest and in no one's special interest.
Milton Friedman
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There is not a line in 'The Wealth of Nations' that is not still applicable to this day.
Milton Friedman
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If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
Milton Friedman
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Germany cannot get out of the euro. What it has to do, therefore, is make the economy more flexible - to eliminate the restrictions on prices, on wages and on employment in short, the regulations that keep 10 percent of the German workforce unemployed.
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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There's no way to avoid a burden on your freedom. The costs themselves are a burden on your freedom. The restrictions that are necessary in order to get rid of the terrorists are a burden to your freedom. So there's no way in the short run to avoid a restriction on your freedom.
Milton Friedman
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You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.
Milton Friedman
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[T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends.
Milton Friedman
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Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of drug-related crimes, but also on the belief that relieving our police and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drug use will enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to combating other forms of crime.
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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So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.
Milton Friedman
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The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success. I'm not sure that I would as of today push it as hard as I once did.
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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The central banks cannot control interest rates. That's a mistake. They can control a particular rate, such as the Federal Funds rate, if they want to, but they can't control interest rates.
Milton Friedman