We're often told that it is too difficult to access healthcare services in America. So why are "certificate of need" laws being enacted making it harder to create new healthcare facilities?
In contrast to the classical cost (labor) theory of value, the so-called marginal revolution ushered in the modern, subjective theory, whereby market price is determined by the marginal utility of a good.
If the hallmark of conventional economics is unrealistic models, the hallmark of Austrian economics is a profound appreciation of the price system. Prices provide us with critical information about the relative scarcity of goods and services.
All price changes have real effects on demand for goods, and therefore alter goods' prices relative to one another. For this reason changes in the money supply can't fail to affect resource allocation.
Michael Sandel doesn't like capitalism. But he can't seem to manage an economic argument for why. He's content to claim that capitalism is morally corrupting, converting anticapitalism into a sort of pseudoreligious faith.
The real problem with inflation, properly understood is that it is essentially a wealth transfer away from the most productive parts of the economy. This causes bubbles and economic fragility.
Prices determined in the marketplace are absolutely essential to a functioning economic system. This is no less true if today's property was redistributed unjustly in the past. Market prices today are the path to recovery.
