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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
Understanding
Speak
Facts
Come
Never
Interpreted
Relation
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More quotes by Milton Friedman

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The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.
Milton Friedman
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Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.
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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Money is a very powerful thing, which you hardly notice when it goes right, but which can create havoc when it goes wrong.
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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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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The state of our educational system is a disgrace to our country. We have an elementary and secondary school system in which close to half of the youngsters never graduate properly. It's a disgrace that there is more illiteracy today than there was 100 years ago.
Milton Friedman
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Central bankers always try to avoid their last big mistake. So every time there's the threat of a contraction in the economy, they'll over stimulate the economy, by printing too much money. The result will be a rising roller coaster of inflation, with each high and low being higher than the preceding one.
Milton Friedman
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Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself ... Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.
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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I am a limited-government libertarian.
Milton Friedman
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The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
Milton Friedman
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Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
Milton Friedman
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To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served.
Milton Friedman
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To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them... He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive.
Milton Friedman
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On aging societies, there is no reason why a country that has a lot of old people can't be prosperous if, during their working lives, individuals provide for their retirement.
Milton Friedman
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The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power - we must have a dispersion of power.
Milton Friedman
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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.
Milton Friedman
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My interest in political philosophy was rather casual until I met Hayek.
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