Name: Milton Friedman on The Magic of Prices [Original Speech]
Uploaded: 2025-08-28T18:02:53.000Z
Duration: 2 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

The basic principles underlying the free market, as Adam Smith taught them to his students in this university, are really very simple.

There's not a single person in the world who could make this pencil.

The wood from which it's made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington.

This black center, we call it lead, but it's really graphite, compressed graphite.

I'm not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America.

This red top up here, the eraser, a bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn't even native.

It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government.

This brass ferrule, I haven't the slightest idea where it came from.

Or the yellow paint, or the paint that made the black lines, or the glue that holds it together.

Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil.

People who don't speak the same language, who practice different religion, who might hate one another if they ever met.

When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people.

What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil?

There was no commissar sending out orders from some central office.

The impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate to make this pencil so that you could have it for a trifling sum.

That is why the operation of the free market is so essential.

Not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world.

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Milton Friedman on The Magic of Prices [Original Speech]

literally

essential

practice

native