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George Stigler was a delightful correspondent. In a letter from London in 1948, after remarking on the inconvertibility of the pound and the inedible, still-rationed food, he concluded, So here I am losing weight and gaining pounds.

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
London
Correspondent
Letters
Concluded
Weight
Gaining
Losing
Pound
Food
Delightful
Economy
Letter
Inedible
Stills
Pounds
Rationed
Still
George
Remarking

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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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The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
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Political leaders in capitalist countries who cheer the collapse of socialism in other countries continue to favor socialist solutions in their own. They know the words, but they have not learned the tune.
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Whenever you try to do good with someone else's money, you are committed to using force. How can you do good with somebody else's money, unless you first take it away from them? The only way you can take it away from them is the threat of force: you have a policeman, tax collector, who comes and takes it from them.
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If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.
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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.
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A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. And a society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed.
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Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
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Had drugs been decriminalized, crack would never have been invented and there would today be fewer addicts... The ghettos would not be drug-and-crime-infested no-man's lands... Colombia, Bolivia and Peru would not be suffering from narco-terror, and we would not be distorting our foreign policy because of it.
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My major problem with the world is a problem of scarcity in the midst of plenty ... of people starving while there are unused resources ... people having skills which are not being used.
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A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
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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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The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits.
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Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals - the technique of the marketplace.
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World trade depends on differences among countries, not similarities. Different countries are in different stages of development. It is appropriate for them to have different patterns, different policies for ecology, labor standards, and so forth.
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Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else.
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To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a monetary union, putting out a fiat currency, composed of independent states.
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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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The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power - we must have a dispersion of power.
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The government doesn't have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.
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