Price system

In economics, a price system is a component of any economic system that uses prices expressed in any form of money for the valuation and distribution of goods and services and the factors of production. Except for possible remote and primitive communities, all modern societies use price systems to allocate resources, although price systems are not used exclusively for all resource allocation decisions.

A price system may be either a fixed price system where prices are administered by a government body, or it may be a free price system where prices are left to float "freely" as determined by supply and demand uninhibited by regulations. A mixed price system involves a combination of both administered and unregulated prices.

Price systems have been around as long as there has been money.

The price system has evolved into the system of global capitalism that is present in the early 21st century. The Soviet Union and other Communist states with a centralized planned economy maintained controlled price systems. Whether the ruble or the dollar is used in the economic system, the criterion of a price system is the use of money as an arbiter and usual final arbiter of whether a thing is done or not. In other words, few things are done without consideration for the monetary costs and the potential making of a profit in a price system.

The American economist Thorstein Veblen wrote a seminal tract on the development of the term as discussed in this article: The Engineers and the Price System. Its chapter VI, A Memorandum on a Practicable Soviet of Technicians discusses the possibility of socialist revolution in the United States comparable to that then occurring in Russia (the Soviets had not yet at that time become a state (USSR formed in 1922)).

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