So long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.
There is one and only one responsibility of business: to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.
I think there is universal agreement within the economics profession that the decline – the sharp decline in the quantity of money played a very major role in producing the Great Depression.
There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.
The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn’t do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn’t do a thing for them.
You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business.
The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.
The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that’s why it’s so essential to preserving individual freedom.
Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?
You can only make money if you buy a product, whatever it is – maybe a currency, maybe wheat and maybe something else – at a relatively low price and sell it at a higher price than you buy it at. There’s no other way to make money.
If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.
In the 1960s, The National Education Association changed its character. The NEA changed into a union. And from that point on you can see deterioration in the quality of schooling in the United States.
Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. It is made by or stopped by the central bank.
To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a monetary union, putting out a fiat currency, composed of independent states.
Why is it that private insurance companies are not in trouble because people are getting older? Aren’t they subject to the same demographics? The difference is that they’ve accumulated a fund, not a pay-in, pay-out system.
Political leaders in capitalist countries who cheer the collapse of socialism in other countries continue to favor socialist solutions in their own. They know the words, but they have not learned the tune.
Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?
If you continue to use monetary policy to attempt to promote full employment the result would be that you would have higher inflation, and that you would not have lower unemployment.
The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books.
History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.