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Quote by Milton Friedman

“Unfortunately, the hardest thing for people to understand is that maybe if you leave things alone, it'll be better than stepping in and trying to do something.”

Quote by Milton Friedman

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Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman was a renowned economist known for his contributions to the field of free-market economics. His research in monetary economics, consumer behavior, and tax policy has had a profound impact. more

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“The answer to this question is closely connected with that other question which arises here, that of who is to do the planning. It is about this question that all the dispute about “economic planning” centers. This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals. Planning in the specific sense in which the term is used in contemporary controversy necessarily means central planning—direction of the whole economic system according to one unified plan. Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons. The halfway house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the delegation of planning to organized industries, or, in other words, monopoly.”

EconomicsFree MarketMonopolyCentral Planning
Book:The Use of Knowledge in Society
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“[...]those more likely to be at the disposal of particular individuals and those which we should with greater confidence expect to find in the possession of an authority made up of suitably chosen experts. If it is today so widely assumed that the latter will be in a better position, this is because one kind of knowledge, namely, scientific knowledge, occupies now so prominent a place in public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind that is relevant. It may be admitted that, as far as scientific knowledge is concerned, a body of suitably chosen experts may be in the best position to command all the best knowledge available—though this is of course merely shifting the difficulty to the problem of selecting the experts. What I wish to point out is that, even assuming that this problem can be readily solved, it is only a small part of the wider problem.”

ScienceKnowledgeCentral PlanningCult Of ExpertCult Of Scientific Knowledge
Book:The Use of Knowledge in Society
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“The Federal Reserve System had been established to prevent what actually happened. It was set up to avoid a situation in which you would have to close down banks, in which you would have a banking crisis. And yet, under the Federal Reserve system, you had the worst banking crisis in the history of the United States”

EconomyRegulationCentral Planning
Book:The Indispensable Milton Friedman: Essays on Politics and Economics
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