there's the claim that this or that price is unreasonable. I used to have conversations about this claim with Mrs. Williams early on in our 44-year marriage. She'd return from shopping complaining that stores were charging unreasonable prices. Having aired her complaints, she'd ask me to go out and unload a car trunk loaded with groceries and other items. Having completed the chore, I'd resume our conversation, saying, "Honey, I thought you said the prices were unreasonable. Are you an unreasonable person? Only an unreasonable person would pay unreasonable prices." The long and short of it is that the conversation never went over well, and we both ceased discussions of reasonable or unreasonable prices. The point is that whatever price a transaction is transacted at represents a meeting of the mind of both buyer and seller. Both viewed themselves as being better off than the next alternative -- not making the transaction. That's not to say that the seller wouldn't have found a higher price more pleasing or the buyer wouldn't have been pleased with a lower price.
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Economics for the CitizenWalter E. Williams
» Walter E. Williams - all quotes »
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
[In this auction we may expect the article to be sold to] "the most eager buyer at a price which is just about the highest he is willing to pay, for in this case the most eager buyer does not know what prices the other buyers are willing to give [and] ... each buyer fear that someone may slip in ahead of him.
Kenneth Boulding
[The masses] ... must turn their hopes toward a miracle. In the depths of their despair reason cannot be believed, truth must be false, and lies must be truth. "Higher bread prices," "lower bread prices," "unchanged bread prices" have all failed. The only hope lies in a kind of bread price which is none of these, which nobody has ever seen before, and which belies the evidence of one's reason.
Peter F. Drucker
Economists tell us that the 'price' of an object and its 'value' have very little or nothing to do with one another. 'Value' is entirely subjective — economic value, anyway — while 'price' reflects whatever a buyer is willing to give up to get the object in question, and whatever the seller is willing to accept to give it up. Both are governed by the Law of Marginal Utility, which is actually a law of psychology, rather than economics. For government to attempt to dictate a 'fair price' betrays complete misunderstanding of the entire process.
L. Neil Smith
The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating.
Adam Smith
Williams, Walter E.
Williams, William Carlos
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