Purchasing power is an attribute of producers, not of consumers. Purchasing
power is a consequence of production: it is the power of possessing goods which
one can trade for other goods. A “purchase” is an exchange of goods (or
services) for goods (or services). Any other form of transferring goods from
one person to another may belong to many different categories of transactions,
but it is not a purchase. It may be a gift, a loan, an inheritance, a
handout, a fraud, a theft, a robbery, a burglary, an expropriation. In regard
to services, however (omitting temporary or occasional acts of friendship, in
which the payment is the friend’s value), there is only one alternative to
trading: unpaid services, i.e., slavery.