Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 239 of Deirdre McCloskey’s 2024 paper “Market Prices and Wages Do Not Reflect Ethical Value,” which is chapter 19 in The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions About Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy (Ryan A. Bourne, ed., 2024):

The price of water, or the wage of the academic, is not intended by a person or group, neither by you nor by a tyrant nor by a lovely committee of wise economists. So it can no more be praised or blamed ethically than the weather or the varied gifts people have from birth or the house of the Big Bang. The phrase on many lips of “social justice,” Hayek argued, is nonsense. Society does not, in a collective, deliberative, planned human act, settle the price of water or pearls or nurses.