The price system works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time. We never realize how well it functions until it is prev… - Milton Friedman

The “something” that connects the two transactions is called money, and it has taken innumerable physical forms — from stones to feathers to tobacco to shells to copper, silver, and gold to pieces of paper and entries in ledger books. Who knows what will be the future incarnations of money? Computer bytes?

...[One] of the paradoxes of experience is that, in spite of...historical evidence, it is precisely the minority groups that have frequently furnished the most vocal and numerous advocates of fundamental alterations in a capitalist society. They have tended to attribute to capitalism the residual restrictions they experience rather than to recognize that the free market has been the major factor enabling these restrictions to be as small as they are...the purchaser of bread does not know whether it was made from wheat grown by a white man or a [black man], by a Christian or a Jew. In consequence, the producer of wheat is in a position to use resources as effectively as he can, regardless of what the attitudes of the community may be toward his color, the religion, or other characteristics of the people he hires.

What kind of society isn’t structured on greed?... So the problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm. It seems to me that the great virtue of capitalism is that it’s that kind of system. Because under capitalism, the power of any one individual over his fellow man is relatively small.