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More Quotes by Milton Friedman
When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.
The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits.
A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
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.
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?
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.
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
