The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays Quotes

“Social responsibility is a fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "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.”
― Milton Friedman, The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays

“[The]...feeling for what one should want, in contrast with actual desire, is stronger in the unthinking than in those sophisticated by education. It is the later who argues into the ‘tolerant’ (economic) attitude of de gustibus non est disputandum [in matters of taste, there can be no disputes]; the man in the street is more likely to view the individual whose tastes are ‘wrong’ as a scurvy fellow who ought to be despised if not beaten up or shot.”
― Frank H. Knight, Ethics of Competition and Other Essays

“The mathematical economists have commonly been mathematicians first and economists afterward, disposed to oversimplify the data and underestimate the divergence between their premises and facts of life.”
― Frank H. Knight, Ethics of Competition and Other Essays