ABSTRACT
If one were to ask a random sample of people on this planet—confining oneself, realistically, to those whose cultures had adopted money economies and who ought, therefore, to have some feelings about prices—what distinguishes a “just price” from an “unjust” one, one would get, overwhelmingly, a two-component answer: the “just price” of anything, one would be told, is its cost to the seller plus a “fair profit.” For most people, that is all that’s involved. The question of the justness of a price is shifted to the fairness of the profit that went into determining it. Unfair profits—price gouging, taking advantage of an individual in a desperate situation (like offering a man dying of thirst a sip of water for $1,000) or of the community at large (as when a shortage in some essential commodity, like heating oil, is rumored to be coming and merchants “jack up” the price of already purchased stocks so as to keep it artificially high)—are not allowed. What makes the price of a product just, in most people’s eyes, is first, carefully and honestly keeping track of the cost of bringing that product to market, and, second, a sense of what constitutes a fair profit to be added to that cost—for the seller’s trouble, as we might put it.
