Amid all the media hysteria over the price of gasoline and the profits of "Big Oil," one simple fact has been repeatedly overlooked: The oil companies' earnings are just under 10 percent of the price of a gallon of gas, while taxes take 17 percent. Yet who ever accuses the government of "greed"?
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Sir James Russell Lowell: "The ultimate result of protecting fools from their folly is to fill the planet full of fools."
IOW: "If you make the world safe for idiots, you'll get a world filled with idiots."
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"Fair" is in the eye of the beholder; free is the verdict of the market.
The word 'free' is used three times in the Declaration of Independence and once in the First Amendment to the Constitution, along with 'freedom.' The word 'fair' is not used in either of our founding documents.
~ Milton Friedman, Wall Street Journal, Mar. 7, 1996
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What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.
~ Milton Friedman, Wall Street Journal, May 18, 1961
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