Prices

Pages 347-362. Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.

Pages 336-347. Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach. 

While mining doesn't have much impact on the gold price, the reverse is not true: the gold price has significant influence on the mining industry.

Prices and wages as determined in a free market, unrigged by political intervention, are the best means of insuring the production and equitable distribution of the goods and services all men seek.

The only way to guarantee extension of broadband service in an efficient way is to avoid any intervention in the market. Only the free market guarantees that all demand is satisfied, and that the price is the minimum realizable without confiscating wealth from some individuals in favor of others.

Recorded at Mises University 2009.

In the UK as well — thanks to nationalization, price controls, and government rationing of healthcare — thousands of people die needlessly every year because of shortages of kidney dialysis machines, pediatric intensive care units, pacemakers, and even x-ray machines. This is America's future, if "ObamaCare" becomes a reality.

Almost invariably, furthermore, the union is not trying to discover the market rate, but to impose various arbitrary "principles" of wage determination, such as "keeping up with the cost of living," a "living wage," the "going rate" for comparable labor in other firms or industries, an annual average "productivity" increase, "fair differentials," and so forth.

Income is a category of action; it is the outcome of careful economizing of scarce factors.

On a competitive market there is no such thing as a price policy of the sellers. They have no alternative other than to sell as much as they can at the highest price offered to them.