Price System Quotes & Sayings

Our mission, as set forth by the Congress is a critical one: to preserve price stability, to foster maximum sustainable growth in output and employment, and to promote a stable and efficient financial system that serves all Americans well and fairly. — Ben Bernanke

The Fed is pushing a variety of workarounds that would inject trillions in new money into the economy while bypassing the banking system altogether. Time will tell whether or not this will succeed. Meanwhile, a serious danger lurks around the corner. Once the recession is over, the lending will start again. With fractional-reserve banking and limitless supplies of cash on hand, we will likely see the overall price trends reversed, from deflation to inflation to possible hyperinflation. — Llewellyn Rockwell

A state-based regulatory system is quite burdensome. It allows price controls to create market distortions. It can hinder development of national products and can directly impact the competitiveness of U.S. insurers. — Henry Paulson

From cell phones to computers, quality is improving and costs are shrinking as companies fight to offer the public the best product at the best price. But this philosophy is sadly missing from our health-care insurance system. — John Shadegg

Fear and debt drive this system. We are hammered with messages that terrify us into believing that we must pay any price, assume any debt, to stop the enemies who, we are told, lurk at our doorsteps. The — John Perkins

You pay a price when you have an objective sentencing system. That is, nothing is perfect. — Jeff Sessions

Mexico is a country without political freedom, without freedom of speech, without a free press, without a free ballot, without a jury system, without political parties, without any of our cherJ ished guarantees of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is a land where there has been no contest for the office of president for more than a generation, where the executive rules all things by means of a standing army, where political offices are sold for a fixed price. I found Mexico to be a land where the people are poor because they have no rights, where peonage is the rule for the great mass, and where actual chattel slavery obtains for hundreds of thousands. — John Kenneth Turner

We will establish a new system that makes high-quality health care available to every American in a dignified manner and at a price he can afford. — Richard M. Nixon

At any rate, planning in this sense means all-around planning by the government and enforcement of these plans by the police power. Planning in this sense means full government control of business. It is the antithesis of free enterprise, private initiative, private ownership of the means of production, market economy, and the price system. Planning and capitalism are ut- terly incompatible. Within a system of planning production is conducted according to the government's orders, not according to the plans of capitalists and entrepreneurs eager to profit by best filling the wants of the consumers. — Ludwig Von Mises

If a severe pandemic materializes, all of society could pay a heavy price for decades of failing to create a rational system of health care that works for all of us. — Irwin Redlener

"You, who are on the road, must have a code that you can live by-"* You'll find universal agreement on the value of a behavior code, on the need for some sort of ethical system. Even the crooks count on "honor among thieves," and countries actually wage war according to certain rules. On the job and in the rest of our day-to-day living, we each need a "code for the road." — Price Pritchett

Fictions enable us to cooperate better. The price we pay is that the same fictions also determine the goals of our cooperation. So we may have very elaborate systems of cooperation, which are harnessed to serve fictional aims and interests. Consequently the system may seem to be working well, but only if we adopt the systems own criteria. — Yuval Noah Harari

The best approach here if at all possible is to use supervisory and regulatory methods to restrain undue risk-taking and to make sure the system is resilient in case an asset price bubble bursts in the future. — Ben Bernanke

To grow up, a man must stand apart not only from his mother but from his fellows. Human achievement, according to this perspective, is always to be measured in difference, who is the fastest, the most handsome, the richest. The quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon highlights this way of looking at human achievement. Not only do the two men compete for the most honor, symbolized by possessions, but they see their contest as a zero-sum game. That is, they - and all the other warriors - assume that there is a finite amount of honor available, so that if one man gets more, then someone else gets less.

Achilles, with his semidivine nature and abundant physical gifts, would seem to be an example of a man fully equipped for success in this system. And yet, Achilles does not prosper in the world of the poem. As he pursues honor and status among his fellows, he becomes more and more isolated, the price of distinction in a competitive society. — Thomas Van Nortwick

The legal system doesn't always serve as a good guide for your conscience. You can step way over the ethical line and still be inside the law. The same thing goes for rules, policies and procedures - you know, the organization's "internal laws." You can "go by the book" and still behave unethically. Still not move beyond mediocrity. High standards-the ethics of excellence-come to life through your basic values, your character, integrity and honesty. Obeying the law is the bare minimum. — Price Pritchett

Veblen called it the price-system. Mills called it the Power Elite. It's probably no more than ninety-nine people who don't know what they are doing. They're involved in high finance. Fascinating form of gambling. — John Cage

For him morality was neither conformism nor philosophic wisdom, but living the infinite fullness of possibilities. He believed in morality's capacity for intensification, in stages of moral experience, and not merely, as most people do, in stages of moral understanding, as if it were something cut-and-dried for which people were just not pure enough. He believed in morality without believing in any specific moral system. Morality is generally understood to be a sort of police regulations for keeping life in order, and since life does not obey even these, they come to look as if they were really impossible to live up to and accordingly, in this sorry way, not really an ideal either. But morality must not be reduced to this level. Morality is imagination. This was what he wanted to make Agathe see. And his second point was: Imagination is not arbitrary. Once imagination is left to caprice, there is a price to pay. — Robert Musil

The ACA is an ugly patch on an ugly system - and I don't think it's worth mentioning in the context of price or quality transparency. — Uwe Reinhardt

When you own gold you're fighting every central bank in the world. That's because gold is a currency that competes with government currencies and has a powerful influence on interest rates and the price of government bonds. And that's why central banks long have tried to suppress the price of gold. Gold is the ticket out of the central banking system, the escape from coercive central bank and government power. — James Rickards

She woke to sunlight and the scent of coffee. The first thing she saw was Roarke, with a mug of coffee in his hand.
"how much would you pay for this?"
"Name your price." she sat up took it from him, drank gratefully. "this is one of my favorite parts of the marriage deal." She let the caffeine flow through her system. "I mean the sex is pretty good, but the coffee ... the Cofee is amazing. And you're all-round handy yourself most of the time.. thanks."
"Don't mention it. — J.D. Robb

When you have a transportation system that the price of propellant is essentially negligible something is very wrong. If you look at any other transportation system, a car, a motorcycle, a train, an oil tanker, an airliner, you name it; about a quarter to a third of the operating cost is buying the propellant. — Burt Rutan

In this way the world market is, with regard to its immanent dynamic, 'a space in which everyone has once been a productive labourer, and in which labour has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system'. — Slavoj Zizek

Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought. — Cyril Connolly

The way to improve productivity is not to bring in experts to talk about inputs - seed, equipment and materials, pesticides or water supply. The way to start is to provide an assured market, a fair price, and a system through which rural producers can market their produce which is reasonably efficient and can transfer to them the maximum share of the consumers' money. If such a structure is erected, the producers will then seek the inputs and materials they need to increase their production and productivity. — Verghese Kurien

This whole fucking country's got it great and doesn't even know it. Why? Because the price for having it so great gets paid somewhere else, by somebody else, where you don't have to see it. Out of sight, out of mind. That's the fucking key to the whole shit system. Stay blind, stay deaf. — Paul Russell

Rogers had been open about a year, and everything was just piled up on tables, with no rhyme or reason whatsoever. Sam asked me to kind of group the stuff by category or department, and that's when we began our department system. The thing I remember most, though, was the way we priced goods. Merchandise would come in and we would just lay it down on the floor and get out the invoice. Sam wouldn't let us hedge on a price at all. Say the list price was $1.98, but we had only paid 50 cents. Initially, I would say, 'Well, it's originally $1.98, so why don't we sell it for $1.25?' And he'd say, 'No. We paid 50 cents for it. Mark it up 30 percent, and that's it. No matter what you pay for it, if we get a great deal, pass it on to the customer.' And of course that's what we did." It — Sam Walton

Most people are oblivious to F.A. Hayek's insight that the critical information needed to run an economy - or even 15 percent of one - doesn't exist in any one place where it is accessible to central planners. Instead, it is scattered piecemeal among millions of people. All those people put together are far wiser and better informed than Congress could ever be. Only markets - private property, free exchange and the price system - can put this knowledge at the disposal of entrepreneurs and consumers, ensuring the system will serve the people and not just the political class. — John Stossel

It's easy to talk about our system not functioning. It's actually functioning exactly the way we've designed it to function by giving so much power to the political parties, which all of our, you know, leading founders - Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison - all said don't create political parties like the ones we have now. We did it, and we're paying a very high price for it. — Mickey Edwards

In those meetings, I learned that even economic diagrams needn't be linear. Ours was a nest of concentric circles, and an enterprise was measured by its value to each circle, from the individual and family to the community and environment. I realized that Rebecca and her colleagues were trying to do nothing less than transform the System of National Accounts, the statistical framework here and in most countries for measuring economic activity. For instance, the value of a tree depends on its estimated value or sale price, but if it is sold and cut down, there is no accounting on the debit side of the ledger for loss of oxygen, seeding of other trees, or value to the community or the environment. This group was inventing a new way of measuring profit and loss.
By the end of our days together, I understood economics in a whole new way. A balance sheet really could be about balance. — Gloria Steinem

Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm - to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut. This — Stephen R. Covey

My concern is not for the judicial system, but for the reality that the shark fin mafia of Costa Rica has a price on my head, and a Costa Rican prison would provide an excellent opportunity for someone to exercise this lethal contract against me. — Paul Watson

We will soon be living in an era in which we cannot guarantee survivability of any single point. However, we can still design systems in which system destruction requires the enemy to pay the price of destroying n of n stations. If n is made sufficiently large, it can be shown that highly survivable system structures can be built. — Paul Baran

I finish a short afternoon shift that I spent learning about book descriptions with George. It is an arcane system that the Internet is putting paid to, where fair is foul and good is bad and perfect means you are a charlatan. Price-clipped is bad. Second impression is bad. Inscribed is bad, unless it is by the author, and then inscribed is good, but nearly as good as signed. Unless the inscription is to someone patently important - To my dear Laura, love from Petrarch. — Deborah Meyler

The unique aspect of today's monetary inflation is that it is not limited to one country, but a host of countries are all inflating together. As a result of the monetary inflation (when all of the newly created money begins to leave the banks and enter the system), the price inflation will be worldwide. — Peter DeGraaf

The crisis is the price for the capitalist system — Muhammad Yunus

If this is the price to be paid for an idea, then let us pay. There is no need of being troubled about it, afraid, or ashamed. This is the time to boldly say, Yes, I believe in the displacement of this system of injustice by a just one; I believe in the end of starvation, exposure, and the crimes caused by them; I believe in the human soul regnant over all laws which man has made or will make; I believe there is no peace now, and there will never be peace, so long as one rules over another; I believe in the total disintegration and dissolution of the principle and practice of authority; I am an Anarchist, and if for this you condemn me, I stand ready to receive your condemnation. — Voltairine De Cleyre

I am convinced that if the market system were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aims, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

In neo-classical economic theory, it is claimed without evidence that people are basically self-seeking, that they want above all the satisfaction of their material desires: what economists call "maximising utility". The ultimate objective of mankind is economic growth, and that is maximized only through raw, and lightly regulated, competition. If the rewards of this system are spread unevenly, that is a necessary price. Others on the planet are to be regarded as either customers, competitors or factors of production. Effects upon the planet itself are mere "externalities" to the model, with no reckoning of the cost - at least for now. Nowhere in this analysis appears factors such as human cooperation, love, trust, compassion or hatred, curiosity or beauty. Nowhere appears the concept of meaning. What cannot be measured is ignored. But the trouble is that once our basic needs for shelter and food have been met, these factors may be the most important of all. — Carne Ross

Supermarkets in Denmark have experimented with adding a second bar code to packages of meat that when scanned at a kiosk in the store brings up on a monitor images of the farm where the meat was raised, as well as detailed information on the particular animal's genetics, feed, medications, slaughter date, etc. Most of the meat in our supermarkets simply couldn't withstand that degree of transparency; if the bar code on the typical package of pork chops summoned images of the CAFO it came from, and information on the pig's diet and drug regimen, who could bring themselves to buy it? Our food system depends on consumers' not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. — Michael Pollan

This country is a nation of thieves. It stole everything it has, beginning with black people. The U.S. cannot justify its existence as the policeman of the world any longer. I do not want to be a part of the American pie. The American pie means raping South Africa, beating Vietnam, beating South America, raping the Philippines, raping every country you've been in. I don't want any of your blood money. I don't want to be part of that system. We must question whether or not we want this country to continue being the wealthiest country in the world at the price of raping everybody else. — Stokely Carmichael

Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Only fools flout them. The much-maligned price system works not only to secure supply but to conserve. — Ilana Mercer

De Blasio went even further, delving back into the Target fray. The pol was a trustee of the New York City Employee Retirement System, which owned shares in Target. The left had already forced Target to cease using money in campaigns via trade associations. Yet the retailer hadn't been able to shake the assault; activists sought to continue making an example of it. They scored a particular hit in 2011, when pop star Lady Gaga very publicly ended a deal with Target for her newest album due to its "continued political activity." Target's share price kept dropping. — Kimberley Strassel

The ninety-nine cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of that meal's true cost
to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the welfare of the animals themselves. — Michael Pollan

Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses." — Gore Vidal

For people choosing to use a network marketing system to build a business in the B quadrant, the price of entry is a lot lower, the risks are lower, and the education and support are there to guide you through this personal development process. — Robert Kiyosaki

A system in which legal police shootings of unarmed civilians are a common occurrence is a system that has some serious flaws. In this case, the drawback is a straightforward consequence of America's approach to firearms. A well-armed citizenry required an even-better-armed constabulary. Widespread gun ownership creates a systematic climate of fear on the part of the police. The result is a quantity of police shootings that, regardless of the facts of any particular case, is just staggeringly high. Young black men, in particular, are paying the price for America's gun culture. — Matthew Yglesias

Our system freed the individual genius of man. Released him to fly as high & as far as his own talent & energy would take him. We allocate resources not by government. decision but by the millions of decisions customers make when they go into the market. place to buy. If something seems too high-priced we buy something else. Thus resources are steered toward those things the people want most at the price they are willing to pay. It may not be a perfect system but it's better than any other that's ever been tried. — Ronald Reagan

The price of being a nice guy is too high - much too high - in terms of the system of justice. — Jed S. Rakoff

How, I asked myself, do you convince men and women who live comfortably to change a system that provides their comforts
even when they know about EHMs and jackals, when they understand that attached to their comforts are terrible price tags? Where do you find words to empower them to stand up to a force like the corporatocracy? How do you inspire them to take actions that will bend the corporations to the will of the people? — John Perkins

Pakistan is, I always feel, hopeful. You know, our system of government is not, and the system of foreign policy whereby we do whatever is asked of us as long as the price is right only proves to fundamentalist outfits and to militant groups that when we talk of things like democracy, when we talk of things like foreign policy, what we're really talking about is being pro-American. — Fatima Bhutto

Black-Scholes is a know-nothing system. If you know nothing about value - only price - then Black-Scholes is a pretty good guess at what a 90-day option might be worth. But the minute you get into longer periods of time, it's crazy to get into Black-Scholes. For example, at Costco we issued stock options with strike prices of $30 and $60, and Black-Scholes valued the $60 ones higher. This is insane. — Charlie Munger

If you take your kid in for the sniffles, you pay $20, but the full cost is $200. And so we need to get back to the price system where you see the full cost of health care, and then people will make smarter decisions. That will reduce health care costs, and it's a huge part of our economy. — Dave Brat

The government desires to purchase; it desires to use the market, not to disorganize it. But the officially-fixed price does disorganize the market in which commodities and services are bought and sold for money. Commerce, so far as it is able, seeks relief in other ways. It re-develops a system of direct exchange, in which commodities and services are exchanged without the instrumentality of money. Those who are forced to dispose of commodities and services at the fixed prices do not dispose of them to everybody, but merely to those to whom they wish to do a favour. Would-be purchasers wait in long queues in order to snap up what they can get before it is too late; they race breathlessly from shop to shop, hoping to find one that is not yet sold out. — Ludwig Von Mises

There's something that's so basically corrupt about any system in which a good and fair profit is not enough. There has to be more, every year, every quarter, because your stock price has to rise. — Paul Haggis

When numbers are substituted for morality, and no individual can claim a right, but any gang can assert any desire whatever, when compromise is the only policy expected of those in power, and the preservation of the moment's "stability," of peace at any price, is their only goal - the winner, necessarily, is whoever presents the most unjust and irrational demands; the system serves as an open invitation to do so. — Ayn Rand

If you try to improve the performance of a system of people, machines, and procedures by setting numerical goals for the improvement of individual parts of the system, the system will defeat your efforts and you will pay a price where you least expect it. — Myron Tribus

Oh, and another change from your system: our prisons are now privately owned and operated." "Really?" West asked, frowning. "I thought governments in my time experimented with privatizing prisons and it didn't work very well." "That's because those prisons weren't really 'private.' They were still paid for by government tax dollars and operated as government-enforced monopolies. They didn't have to compete to provide the best service at the best price. Of course they were almost as inefficiently-run as ones operated directly by government. "Now criminals can choose the prison they wish to live in, and must pay the costs themselves. This means that prisons compete to provide the best care at the lowest prices. They cannot abuse prisoners without being sued and going out of business, and they cannot overcharge or no one will choose their services. — Beth Cody

The price system is a mechanism for coordinating knowledge; and — Friedrich Hayek

Since 1994, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have considered it politically risky to offer a plan to fix America's broken health care system. The American public, though, has paid the price for this silence as health care costs skyrocketed, millions went uninsured, and millions more grappled with financial insecurity and hardship. — Ron Wyden

Assume that a surgeon has discovered how to do brain surgery, that he can do only one a month, that 1,000 persons a year need such an operation if they are to survive. How is the surgeon's scarce resource to be allocated? Charge whatever price is necessary to adjust supply and demand, say $50,000! 'For shame,' some will cry. 'Your market system will save only wealthy people.' For the moment, yes. But soon there will be hundreds of surgeons who will acquire the same skill; and, as in the case of the once scarce and expensive 'miracle drugs,' the price then will be within reach of all. — Leonard Read

This country pays a price whenever our economy fails to deliver rising living standards to our citizens - which is exactly what has been the case for years now. We pay a price when our political system cannot come together and agree on the difficult but necessary steps to rein in entitlement spending or reform our tax system. — Chris Christie

After the last two years of springtime gas price spikes, nearly everyone in Southeast Wisconsin understands that something is wrong with our gasoline regulation and supply system. — Jim Sensenbrenner

To the despair of every economist, it seems almost impossible for most people other than trained economists to comprehend how a price system works. Reporters and TV commentators seem especially resistant to the elementary principles they supposedly imbibed in freshman economics. Second, — Milton Friedman

In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

I hope people don't compare 2D and 3D because 3D's new, it's unfair to compare to 2D which is really sophisticated, even when we're jaded about it. 3D just began, give it a chance, let the equipment and projection system catch up and be better, let the price go down, let more filmmakers get a hold of it more easily. — Ang Lee

To be sure, the use of force by one party in a market transaction in order to improve his price was no invention of capitalism. Unequal exchange is an ancient practice. What was remarkable about capitalism as a historical system was the way in which this unequal exchange could be hidden; indeed, hidden so well that it is only after five hundred years of the operation of this mechanism that even the avowed opponents of the system have begun to unveil it systematically. — Immanuel Wallerstein

For once the commodities have been sold that were already on the market when their price was authoritatively fixed at a level below that demanded by the situation of the market, then the emptied store-rooms are not filled again. Charging more than a certain price is prohibited, but producing and selling has not been made compulsory. There are no longer any sellers. The market ceases to function. But this means that economic organization based on division of labour becomes impossible. The level of money-prices cannot be fixed without overthrowing the system of social division of labour. — Ludwig Von Mises

I'm far from perfect. I'm still learning. I overworked myself, and I paid the price. I consider the breakdown a breakthrough. I needed to hit rock bottom. I needed to understand the cost of pushing so hard; fighting so hard against the system.. — Mariah Carey

Almost every economist agrees that the American health care system is unsustainable. Medical care is so expensive that it is busting all of our budgets - government, business, and personal. Eventually, the medical price bubble will pop. What, then, are the alternatives? — Jim Cooper

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything. — Charles Moore

Change comes, when every person is adequately benefited.
We keep hearing about "change." Change will never come to all of society. Change can only come when the market system adequately provide all of the needs for all people. Millions are living in poverty in the United States and throughout the world, due to "change" passed them by, are struggling: Among them are high unemployment, the mentally challenged, poor education, many of them are homeless and hungry, sick and tired; such individuals, look for ways to move beyond their prison walls that hold them back from moving forward: Through the corridors of their prison, they observe the wealthy getting wealthier. They see the market system passing them at a fast rate of speed. Hope has long left the majority of them. There is a price that must be paid for the sins of those who have built these prisons. — Ellen J. Barrier

It is indeed paradoxical that, while the apologists of capitalism usually consider the 'price mechanism' to be the great advantage of the capitalist system, price flexibility proves to be a characteristic feature of the socialist economy. — Michal Kalecki

The problem is that, in a world of floating exchange rates, as Italy was before the euro, if one country is subjected to a shock which requires it to cut wages, it cannot do so with a modern kind of control and regulation system. It is much easier to do it by letting the exchange rate change. Only one price has to change, instead of many. — Milton Friedman

We think of prices as simply the notation of how much we must pay for things. But the price system accomplishes far more than that. Hundreds of millions of people buying and selling, and abstaining from buying and selling, generate a system of signals - prices to producers and consumers about relative scarcities and demand. Through this system, consumers can convey to producers their subjective priorities and entrepreneurs can invest accordingly. — Sheldon Richman