CHAPTER 15
Ethics, Fairness, and Value Pricing
Market Competition leads a self-interested person to wake up in the morning, look outside at the earth and produce from its raw materials, not what he wants, but what others want. Not in the quantities he prefers, but in the quantities his neighbors prefer. Not at the price he dreams of charging, but at a price reflecting how much his neighbors value what he has done.
—Friedrich A. von Hayek
Capitalism offers nothing but frustrations and rebuffs to those who wish—because of claimed superiority of intelligence, birth, credentials, or ideals—to get without giving, to take without risking, to profit without sacrifice, to be exalted without humbling themselves to understand others and meet their needs.
—George Gilder
Throughout history the morality of profits and a just price has been debated endlessly, as it should be. The late Father Richard John Neuhaus, in his book Doing Well and Doing Good, explains the ancient debate of a “just” price:
The idea that there is a right amount or a “just” amount always runs up against the question, Compared to what? The conventional answer is that one pays what the market demands, or what the market will bear. From Athens to Elizabethan England to the Great Terror of the French Revolution, societies have experimented with “sumptuary laws” setting limits on people’s income and expenditures. The experiments have never worked out very well, the obvious reason being that it is almost impossible to agree on ...
