Well first of all, tell me: Is there some society you know that doesnt run on greed? You think Russia doesnt run on greed? You think China doesnt run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, its only the other fellow whos greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didnt construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didnt revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty youre talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, its exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear, that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system.
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About Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman was a 20th-century American economist and statistician. Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism before shifting their focus to new classical macroeconomics in the mid-1970s. Read more on Wikipedia →