What's the difference? How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There's a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not?
Interpretation
The quote questions the inconsistency in views on immigration over time, suggesting that what was once acceptable may no longer be feasible.
Milton Friedman critiques the inconsistent attitudes toward immigration, highlighting how societal, economic, and political contexts alter the perception and viability of free immigration. He argues that while free immigration was beneficial before 1914, the complexities of today's world render that approach impractical, calling for a deeper understanding of historical and contemporary factors influencing immigration policies.
In practice
This quote could be used in a debate about current immigration laws to highlight historical perspectives.
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.
Self-realization and self-fulfilment are the sine qua non for human existence.
It appears to me that those who rely simply on the weight of authority to prove any assertion, without searching out the arguments to support it, act absurdly. I wish to question freely and to answer freely without any sort of adulation. That well becomes any who are sincere in the search for truth.
It was too much. The comfortable people made comfortable jokes about weather and things but I sat mostly silent saying a word or so when necessary a word or so trying to hide from them the fact that I was a fool and feeling terrible And I was numb, numb again, numb again again and again, numbness and pain swelling in me.
But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you--knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that.
I tell the truth; listen everyone. Only those who have Loved, will realise the Lord
Truthfulness is the foundation of all the virtues of mankind
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