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- A Modest Proposal About Presidential Debates - September 30, 2020
- On the Death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg - September 19, 2020
Milton Friedman was born 105 years ago today. Let’s celebrate with some thoughts from Professor Friedman himself, taken from the website of the Becker-Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago:
“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.”
“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”
“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
“Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative – the building blocks of success throughout our society.”
“Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”
“I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it’s only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.”
“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.”
Read more here, and watch this great video of Milton Friedman communicating the power of free-market capitalism to a popular audience on the Phil Donahue show in 1979. Oh … if only we had shows like that on the air today.
