Not the price of what you bought. The price of the act of buying it.
Every exchange of value carries a cost beyond the value itself — a bank’s cut, a lawyer’s fee, the time spent verifying the other party is trustworthy. Ronald Coase’s 1937 “The Nature of the Firm” argued that these transaction costs, not production costs, are what actually determine whether an exchange happens inside a firm (via employment and hierarchy) or across a market (via a series of paid transactions) — a foundational move that treats friction as a first-class economic force rather than something to assume away.
A system with no transaction fees isn’t claiming money moves for free in some absolute sense. It’s claiming the friction has been relocated — from a fee charged per transaction to something else entirely (trust, relationship, mutual accountability) that doesn’t need to be priced per transfer.
Source: Coase, R.H., “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica, 1937.