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The facts never speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted in terms of some understanding of where they come from and what the relation between them is.

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
Relation
Terms
Term
Understanding
Speak
Facts
Come
Never
Interpreted

More quotes by Milton Friedman

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In a free society, it is hard for 'good' people to do 'good', but that is a small price to pay for making it hard for 'evil' people to do 'evil', especially since one man's good is another's evil
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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.
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Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.
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[T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends.
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The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits.
Milton Friedman
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There is only one social responsibility of business
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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Economic freedom is ... an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.
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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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.
Milton Friedman
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How did we make the transition from using wood to using coal, from using coal to using oil, from using oil to using natural gas? How in God's name did we make that transition without a Federal Energy Agency?
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There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Milton Friedman
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If a country is an attractive place for foreigners to invest their funds, then that country will have a relatively high exchange rate. If it's an unattractive place, it will have a relatively low exchange rate. Those are the fundamentals that determine the exchange rate in a floating exchange rate system.
Milton Friedman
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The Depression, which started in 1929 was rather mild from 1929 to 1930. And, indeed, in my opinion would have been over in 1931 at the latest had it not been that the Federal Reserve followed a policy which led to bank failures, widespread bank failures, and led to a reduction in the quantity of money.
Milton Friedman
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The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.
Milton Friedman
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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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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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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.
Milton Friedman
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A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
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You mustn't judge a politician by talk. You have to judge them by performance.
Milton Friedman