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The widespread enthusiasm for reducing government taxes and other impositions is not matched by a comparable enthusiasm for eliminating government programs--except programs that benefit other people. The
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Milton Friedman |
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On the contrary, the inflation itself is partly a response to the reaction. As it has become politically less attractive to vote higher taxes to pay for higher spending, legislators have resorted to financing spending through inflation, a hidden tax that can be imposed without having been voted, taxation without representation. That is no more popular in the twentieth century than it was in the eighteenth.
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Milton Friedman |
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As these remarks indicate, the Social Security program involves a transfer from the young to the old. To some extent such a transfer has occurred throughout history--the young supporting their parents, or other relatives, in old age. Indeed, in many poor countries with high infant death rates, like India, the desire to assure oneself of progeny who can provide support in old age is a major reason for high birth rates and large families. The..
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Milton Friedman |
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The question that has perhaps divided students of vouchers more than any other is their likely effect on the social and economic class structure. Some have argued that the great value of the public school has been as a melting pot, in which rich and poor, native- and foreign-born, black and white have learned to live together. That image was and is largely true for small communities, but almost entirely false for large cities. There, the pu..
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Milton Friedman |
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One feature of the voucher plan that has aroused particular concern is the possibility that parents could and would "add on" to the vouchers. If the voucher were for, say, $1,500, a parent could add another $500 to it and send his child to a school charging $2,000 tuition. Some fear that the result might be even wider differences in educational opportunities than now exist because low-income parents would not add to the amount of the vouche..
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Milton Friedman |
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This view seems to us an example of the kind of egalitarianism discussed in the preceding chapter: letting parents spend money on riotous living but trying to prevent them from spending money on improving the schooling of their children. It is particularly remarkable coming from Coons and Sugarman, who elsewhere say, "A commitment to equality at the deliberate expense of the development of individual children seems to us the final corruptio..
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Milton Friedman |
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7) The impact on public schools. It is essential to separate the rhetoric of the school bureaucracy from the real problems that would be raised. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers claim that vouchers would destroy the public school system, which, according to them, has been the foundation and cornerstone of our democracy. Their claims are never accompanied by any evidence that the public school system..
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Milton Friedman |
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It is often maintained that while a let-alone, limited government policy was feasible in sparsely settled nineteenth-century America, government must play a far larger, indeed dominant, role in a modern urbanized and industrial society. One hour in Hong Kong will dispose of that view. Our society is what we make it. We can shape our institutions. Physical and human characteristics limit the alternatives available to us. But none prevents us..
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Milton Friedman |
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i) Social benefits. When we first started writing about higher education, we had a good deal of sympathy for the first justification. We no longer do. In the interim we have tried to induce the people who make this argument to be specific about the alleged social benefits. The answer is almost always simply bad economics. We are told that the nation benefits by having more highly skilled and trained people, that investment in providing such..
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Milton Friedman |
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Exchange is truly voluntary only when nearly equivalent alternatives exist. Monopoly implies the absence of alternatives and thereby inhibits effective freedom of exchange.
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Milton Friedman |
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In the modern world, tariffs and similar restrictions on trade have been one source of friction among nations. But a far more troublesome source has been the far-reaching intervention of the state into the economy in such collectivist states as Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Franco's Spain, and especially the communist countries, from Russia and its satellites to China.
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Milton Friedman |
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Higher government spending will not lead to more rapid monetary growth and inflation if additional spending is financed either by taxes or by borrowing from the public. In that case, government has more to spend, the public has less. Higher government spending is matched by lower private spending for consumption and investment. However,
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Milton Friedman |
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As Dr. Gunnar Biorck, an eminent Swedish professor of medicine and head of the department Of medicine at a major Swedish hospital, has written: The setting in which medicine has been practiced during thousands of years has been one in which the patient has been the client and employer of the physician. Today the State, in one manifestation or the other, claims to be the employer and, thus, the one to prescribe the conditions under which t..
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Milton Friedman |
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I have no right to coerce someone else, because I cannot be sure that I'm right and he is wrong.
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Milton Friedman |
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Make politics an avocation, not a vocation.
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Milton Friedman |
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Society doesn't have values. People have values.
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Milton Friedman |
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Governments never learn. Only people learn.
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Milton Friedman |
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There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.
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Milton Friedman |
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You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.
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Milton Friedman |
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If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven't cut taxes enough.
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Milton Friedman |
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The price system transmits only the important information and only to the people who need to know.
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Milton Friedman |
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One reason why money is a mystery to so many is the role of myth or fiction or convention.
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Milton Friedman |