Wealth & Money Quote by Thomas Sowell

Sowell is trying to rescue “prices” from their PR problem. In a culture that equates markets with greed, he reframes price tags as infrastructure: not a moral endorsement of money, but a communications technology that lets millions of strangers align their plans without sharing a brain. The line’s quiet provocation is that the alternative to prices isn’t some kinder, more humane system; it’s a slower, blurrier one that has to guess at what people want, what inputs cost, and what trade-offs are tolerable.

The craft here is the pivot: “not because” denies the accusation (money worship) while “but because” installs a different logic (information). He’s smuggling in Hayek’s argument about dispersed knowledge: no central planner, committee, or well-meaning expert can hold the localized, constantly changing facts that sit in shop inventories, harvest yields, shipping bottlenecks, and household budgets. Prices compress all that chaos into a number you can act on. High prices are a flare: something is scarce relative to demand; conserve it, find substitutes, produce more. Low prices are a shrug: we can afford to use more, or producers should stop wasting effort here.

The subtext is skeptical of moralized economics. If you want outcomes like affordability or stability, Sowell suggests, you don’t get there by wishing away the “cold” mechanism; you either work with it or you build an alternative coordination system that can match its speed. Historically, that’s a shot across the bow at price controls and command economies, where muffling the signal often creates the very shortages that then demand more control.