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- If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand
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- When a man spends his own money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about how much he spends and how he spends it. When a man spends his own money to buy something for someone else, he is still very careful about how much he spends, but somewhat less what he spends it on. When a man spends someone else’s money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about what he buys, but doesn’t care at all how much he spends. And when a man spends someone else’s money on someone else, he does’t care how much he spends or what he spends it on. And that’s government for you.
- The essential notion of a capitalist society … is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force
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- One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results
- Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government– in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.
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- The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits
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- You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do
- You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.
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- There’s no doubt in my mind that Ronald Reagan was by far the greatest. Because he had real principles and he stuck by them. He made clear what he was going to do, and he did it. He didn’t back down
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- Why have we had such a decline in moral climate? I submit to you that a major factor has been a change in the philosophy which has been dominant, a change from belief in individual responsibility to belief in social responsibility. If you adopt the view that a man is not responsible for his own behavior, that somehow society is responsible, why should he seek to make his behavior good?
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- The government doesn’t have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others
- Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own
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- I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or it they try, they will shortly be out of office
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- Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program
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- The key insight of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another
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- If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don’t be surprised if you get unemployment
- A society that puts equality — in the sense of equality of outcome — ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.
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- You know there are very few Marxists left in the world… they’re all in American universities.
- Now that I’m 60, every morning I look in the mirror and say, “I don’t know who you are, stranger, but I’m gonna shave you anyway”
- Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn’t really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it, and doesn’t just talk about it, he wants to have the right amount of pollution. We can’t really afford to eliminate it – not without abandoning all the benefits of technology that we not only enjoy but on which we depend
- The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
- The evidence of history speaks with a single voice. I do not know any exception to the proposition that if you compare like with like, the freer the system, the better off the ordinary poor people have been
- Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay
- 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
- .Milton Friedman
