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Milton Friedman Quotes - Page 12

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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

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
Running, Order, Cost
Source: www.foxnews.com

It is taken for granted that workers should receive their pay partly in kind, in the form of medical care provided by the employer. How come? Why single out medical care? Surely food is no less essential to life than medical care. Why is it not at least as logical for workers to be required to buy their food at the company store as to be required to buy their medical care at the company store?

Milton Friedman
Taken, Care, Pay

The euro is going to be a big source of problems, not a source of help.

Milton Friedman
Helping, Problem, Source
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

I am convinced that the minimum-wage law is the most anti-Negro law on our statute books in its effect, not its intent.

Milton Friedman
Book, Law, Minimum Wage
Milton Friedman (1972). “An economist's protest: columns in political economy”

Undoubtedly Internet has reduced the possibilities of taxation. Why should I buy something here if I can buy it from a company in Japan or England or Brazil with a lower tax?

Milton Friedman
Japan, Brazil, Taxation
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

In the US, the problem is primary and secondary education. We've had such an increase in inequality because a quarter of American kids don't finish high school!

Milton Friedman
School, Kids, Problem
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Japan has introduced fiscal stimulus five times in the past seven or eight years and each time it's been a failure and that's not a surprise. Fiscal stimulus is not stimulating in and of itself.

Milton Friedman
Past, Eight, Japan

When they so-called 'target the interest rate', what they're doing is controlling the money supply via the interest rate. The interest rate is only an intermediary instrument.

Milton Friedman
Target, Instruments, Interest

The lesson for Asia is; if you have a central bank, have a floating exchange rate; if you want to have a fixed exchange rate, abolish your central bank and adopt a currency board instead. Either extreme; a fixed exchange rate through a currency board, but no central bank, or a central bank plus truly floating exchange rates; either of those is a tenable arrangement. But a pegged exchange rate with a central bank is a recipe for trouble.

Milton Friedman
Recipes, Want, Asia

Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of drug-related crimes, but also on the belief that relieving our police and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drug use will enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to combating other forms of crime.

Milton Friedman
Fighting, Blow, Law
"Tyranny of the status quo".

Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that's a different question. He's always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that and the other thing.

Milton Friedman
Government, Special, Favors
Milton Friedman (2017). “Milton Friedman on Freedom: Selections from The Collected Works of Milton Friedman”, p.71, Hoover Press

The collapse of communism in essence added tens and tens of millions of people to the world labor supply, and the people who were added had previously been getting very low income, but they were not unskilled. Many of them were fairly well educated.

Milton Friedman
Essence, People, Low Income
Source: www.npr.org

World trade depends on differences among countries, not similarities. Different countries are in different stages of development. It is appropriate for them to have different patterns, different policies for ecology, labor standards, and so forth.

Milton Friedman
Country, Differences, Different
Source: rightwingnews.com

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.

Milton Friedman
Army, Intelligent, Men
Source: www.foxnews.com

The preservation of liberty, not the promotion of efficiency, is the primary justification for private property. Efficiency is a happy, though not accidental, by-product - and a most important by-product because liberty could not have survived if it had not also produced affluence.

Milton Friedman
Important, Liberty, Affluence

You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.

Milton Friedman
Country, Children, Opportunity

I think in some ways it would make more sense to have as a poverty level a relative concept and say, the level of poverty is that level of income or that level of consumption below which 10 percent of the people now are.

Milton Friedman
Thinking, People, Income
Source: www.pbs.org

Speeches by businessmen on social responsibility...may gain them kudos in the short run. But it helps to strengthen the already too prevalent view that the pursuit of profits is wicked.... There is one and only one social responsibility of business-to...engage in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

Milton Friedman
Running, Responsibility, Views

The power to determine the quantity of money... is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power... Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank.

Milton Friedman
Trust, Mistake, Independent

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.

Milton Friedman
Independent, Principles, Short Positive

There is no person, no theorist so reckless as he who says that the facts speak for themselves.

Milton Friedman
Facts, Speak, Reckless
Source: www.pbs.org

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
Country, Floating, Fundamentals

The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights.

Milton Friedman
Philosophy, Heart, Opportunity
"Capitalism and Freedom". Book by Milton Friedman, Ch. 12 "The Alleviation of Poverty", 1962.

The argument for the free market is a complicated and sophisticated one and depends on demonstration of secondary effects. I have confidence market efficiency will win out.

Milton Friedman
Winning, Market Efficiency, Argument
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

The rule of law does not guarantee freedom, since general law as well as personal edicts can be tyrannical. But increasing reliance on the rule of law clearly played a major role in transforming Western society from a world in which the ordinary citizen was literally subject to the arbitrary will of his master to a world in which the ordinary citizen could regard himself as his own master

Milton Friedman
Law, Ordinary, Doe
Milton Friedman (1975). “There's no such thing as a free lunch”, Open Court Pub Co

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