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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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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
Society
Closer
Ends
Developed
Ever
Aim
Firsts
Equality
First
Neither
Kind
Approach
System
Liberty
Aims

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There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Milton Friedman
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Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.
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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.
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Richard Nixon was a very intelligent and able man. And he had the right ideas. But he did not have the adherence to principles that [Ronald] Reagan had. He did some very good things. We owe to Richard Nixon the volunteer army - he got rid of the draft. And that was a major increase in freedom.
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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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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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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.
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When you have a time of crisis what happens depends on what ideas are floating around, and what ideas have been developed, and thought through, and are made effective.
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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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As a nation, we have been responsible for the murder of literally hundreds of thousands of people at home and abroad by fighting a war that should never have been started and can be won, if at all, only by converting the United States into a police state.
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If you look at the balance sheet, the US is heavily in debt. If you look at the income account - the amount of interest the US pays abroad - it is almost exactly equal to the amount of interest that it receives from abroad. American assets held abroad are earning a higher rate of return than foreign assets held here.
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.
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.
Milton Friedman
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You can only make money if you buy a product, whatever it is - maybe a currency, maybe wheat and maybe something else - at a relatively low price and sell it at a higher price than you buy it at. There's no other way to make money.
Milton Friedman
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There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.
Milton Friedman
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We had much freer trade in the 19th century. We have much less globalization now than we did then.
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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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There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.
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Governments never learn. Only people learn.
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The history of mankind is the history of money losing value.
Milton Friedman