LABOUR, like all other things which are purchased and sold, and which may be increased or diminished in quantity, has its natural and its market price. The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers, on with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution.

...it is the natural tendency of market economies to lower prices that makes them so successful.

Price statistics show clearly that instability in raw-material prices is a prime cause of instability of other prices.

Every commodity is compelled to chose some other commodity for its equivalent.

The natural tendency of the state is inflation.

This is a massive problem for the entrepreneur because commodities are valued at the point of market efficiency. This means that the marketplace drives the price down through competition until the margins are just enough to keep the lights on:

Supply and demand constantly determine the prices of commodities; never balance, or only coincidentally; but the cost of production, for its part, determines the oscillations of supply and demand.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered to him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed.

Putting a low price on valuable environmental resources is a phenomenon that pervades modern society. Agricultural water is not scarce in California; it is underpriced. Flights are stacked up on runways because takeoffs and landings are underpriced. People wait for hours in traffic jams because road use is unpriced. People die premature deaths from small sulfur particles in the air because air pollution is underpriced. And the most perilous of all environmental problems, climate change, is taking place because virtually every country puts a price of zero on carbon dioxide emissions.

[C]onsider an economy with only one private sector and only two assets: money issued by the government to finance its budget deficits, and homogeneous physical capital. Let <math>p</math> be the price of currently produced... consumer goods and capital goods. ...[A]llow the value of existing capital goods ...to diverge from their current reproduction cost—let <math>qp</math> be the market price of existing capital goods.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

I call money “national wealth” and this other “natural wealth.”

It is the natural effect of improvement, however, to diminish gradually the real price of almost all manufactures.