The Value of Nothing

In other words, there is nothing natural about buying and selling things for profit, and allowing markets to determine their value. Before commodities can be bought and sold, they have to become objects that people think can be bought or sold.

there are now even prohibitions on the way we can place ourselves into markets. We are not, for instance, legally allowed to sell our organs. Give them away, yes. Sell, no.

Professors Binding and Hoche took it a step further. They suggested that not all human life is worth the same, and that society as a whole could save money by killing the mentally ill.

In the world of fund management, the systematic confusion surrounding what something is worth has made some people very rich.

One thing is clear: The thinking that got us into this mess is unlikely to rescue us.

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

The recession has not come from a deficit of economic knowledge, but from too much of a particular kind, a surfeit of the spirit of capitalism

If war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography, recession is His way of teaching everyone a little economics.

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

—OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Her 1957 book Atlas Shrugged, in which heroic business moguls fight