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The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.

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
Civilization
Government
Come
Great
Bureaus
Achievements
Achievement

More quotes by Milton Friedman

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It is true that a competitive market is not the whole of society. A great deal depends on the qualities of the population and the nation in how they organize the non-market aspects of society.
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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Economists may not know how to run the economy, but they know how to create shortages or gluts simply by regulating prices below the market, or artificially supporting them from above.
Milton Friedman
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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
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There is only one social responsibility of business
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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The history of mankind is the history of money losing value.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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What's the difference? How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There's a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not?
Milton Friedman
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China's productive system draws upon the other East Asian countries to a great extent. The volume of trade is much larger than the net amount being exported from China. China needs substantial reserves to finance all that.
Milton Friedman
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The big issue is whether the United States will succeed in its venture of reshaping the Middle East. It is not clear to me that using military force is the way to do it. We should not have gone into Iraq. But we have.
Milton Friedman
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I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.
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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Rapid increases in the quantity of money produce inflation. Sharp decreases produce depression.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
Milton Friedman
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A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.
Milton Friedman
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Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
Milton Friedman
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Rich people are the experimental ground for every new development. The nature of progress is that what begins as a luxury for the rich becomes a necessity for the poor as it's developed and passed on.
Milton Friedman