| Abstract: | The only “sense in which we can meaningfully talk about just wages or just prices”, said Friedrich Hayek, is for wages and prices “determined in a free market without deception, fraud or violence”. Conversely, after reviewing three theories of the just price, this paper proposes a classical liberal theory of the just price, called the “catallactic” theory, according to which our understanding of just prices must account for the background institutions of markets. Some transactions could not happen in a market without a certain theory of just prices and such transactions will feed into our understanding of markets, hence making just prices a de facto reality. |
