With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.
Interpretation
Businessmen often support free enterprise, but they may resist it when it threatens their own interests.
This quote by Milton Friedman highlights the paradoxical nature of many business leaders who publicly advocate for free enterprise but simultaneously seek to protect their own positions and profits. It suggests that while the ideology of free market capitalism is championed, individual interests can lead to contradictory behaviors that undermine the principles of fairness and competition inherent in a truly free enterprise system.
In practice
During a business seminar discussing economic policies, one might use this quote to illustrate the idea of self-interest in capitalism.
The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.
Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.
There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.
There is one and only one social responsibility of business - to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits 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.
The great danger to the consumer is the monopoly -whether private or governmental. His most effective protection is free competition at home and free trade throughout the world. The consumer is protected from being exploited by one seller by the existence of another seller from whom he can buy and who is eager to sell to him. Alternative sources of supply protect the consumer far more effectively than all the Ralph Naders of the world.
The strongest argument for free enterprise is that it prevents anybody from having too much power. Whether that person is a government official, a trade union official, or a business executive. If forces them to put up or shut up. They either have to deliver the goods, produce something that people are willing to pay for, are willing to buy, or else they have to go into a different business.
Antiracists must acknowledge that patriarchy has long been a weapon of racism and cannot sit comfortably in any politic of racial transformation.
Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.
The news isn't there to tell you what happened. It's there to tell you what it wants you to hear or what it thinks you want to hear.
Four things greater than all things are Women and horses and power and War.
Motion is always a relative thing. I move in relation to something else. Any particle in this universe can change in relation to any other particle; but take the whole universe as one, and in relation to what can it move? There is nothing besides it. So this infinite Unit is unchangeable, immovable, absolute, and this is the Real Man.
It is only by the abolition of the State, by the conquest of perfect liberty by the individual, by free agreement, association, and absolute free federation that we can reach Communism β the possession in common of our social inheritance, and the production in common of all riches.
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