Quote of the Day: A Fair Exchange is an Unequal Exchange from which All Parties Expect To Gain

Value is the significance a good has for the well-being of a human being or beings. The value of a good is determined by the importance attached to the utility of the marginal unit in satisfying some human want.

All life is change. For men, life is a series of choices by which we seek to exchange something we have for something we prefer. We know what we prefer. No other man or bureaucrat is capable of telling us what we prefer. Our preferences are our values. They provide us with the compass by which we steer all our purposeful actions. And last but not least, a fair exchange is not an equal exchange. A fair exchange is an unequal exchange from which all parties expect to gain.

Barring force, fraud, or human error, every free market transaction provides all parties with a psychic profit or higher value, according to their own scale of values. Anything that raises cost or hinders the free and voluntary transactions of the market place must keep human satisfactions from reaching their highest potential. Today the greatest obstructions to the attainment of higher human satisfactions are the well-meaning but futile political interferences with the mutually beneficial transactions of a free market economy.

This is the summary from must read speech made by the late economist Percy L. Greaves, Jr. (1906–1984)