Posted on 08/26/2025 11:59:57 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
They tell us what is (and what isn’t) worth doing.
Prices matter. Now, I’m a free market, capitalistic type, so of course I’m going to insist that everyone be tied down to mere gilt and pelf in how they live their lives. Yet it is still true that prices really, really matter.
Let’s walk through why that’s true, regardless of your political tribe. Any one thing—any economic resource, fresh water, human labour, cash, capital itself and so on—can be used for a multitude of different things. At any one time, the market price for that thing is the balance between the supply of it and the value in using it to do—in aggregate—all those multitudinous things. Yes, we can even mutter that perhaps the information doesn’t flow here instantaneously and perfectly efficiently. Nevertheless, in its simplest terms, what something costs reflects the value of whatever uses we can put it to.
If we decide that we want to do something new, we need a measure of whether we should or not. In a world where resources are finite, the resources we’ll consume doing this new thing already have prices, thanks to their use in all the other things we’re already doing. So, this new thing we desire to do must add value. We must make a profit doing it. No, this doesn’t mean something that tophatted capitalists get to squirrel away in their subvolcanic secret lair. Rather, it means that the value of the output must be higher than the costs of the inputs. If that’s not true, then we are subtracting value from those resources. Other people could have used them to do their thing and generated value instead.
If something makes us all poorer, we shouldn’t do it. But that’s exactly what happens whenever we use valuable resources to do something which...
(Excerpt) Read more at fee.org ...
I’m a long-time penny pincher, first out of necessity, as I raised three boys, and then it became a habit. If the price is too high, I will not buy it.
Kroger and Walmart are the biggest price gougers. Other states are reporting price drops, not these two. And a 15-mile drive to the next Kroger is a 30-cent gas difference—2.5 oz. Potato chips are $2.00; you can buy a complete Biden-sized reduction for that amount.
The 3 categories with the fastest rising prices are: The cost of government (at all levels), the cost of “health care” (including “health insurance”) and the cost of education (both college costs and the taxes to support government-run K-12).
In my area, gas prices just rose quite a bit. Wonder why that is?
secret locale?
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