Milton Friedman Quotes About Economics
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Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.
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[U]nemployment is ... a side effect of the cure for inflation.
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The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.
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When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union - like public housing in the United States - look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.
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We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
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You know there are very few Marxists left in the world... they're all in American universities.
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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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One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
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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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I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.
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The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.
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I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.
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The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
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Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
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Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
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If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven't cut taxes enough.
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For one thing, there are many "inventions" that are not patentable. The "inventor" of the supermarket, for example, conferred great benefits on his fellowmen for which he could not charge them. Insofar as the same kind of ability is required for the one kind of invention as for the other, the existence of patents tends to divert activity to patentable inventions.
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When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
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Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else's parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds.
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Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
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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.
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What makes it [economics] most fascinating is that its fundamental principles are so simple that they can be written on one page, that anyone can understand them, and yet very few do.
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The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books.
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Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised.
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The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.
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Governments never learn. Only people learn.
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Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.
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The great danger to the consumer is the monopoly -whether private or governmental. His most effective protection is free competition at home and free trade throughout the world. The consumer is protected from being exploited by one seller by the existence of another seller from whom he can buy and who is eager to sell to him. Alternative sources of supply protect the consumer far more effectively than all the Ralph Naders of the world.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
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Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgment...In short, positive economics is or can be an "objective" science.
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