And, first, I premise that labor is, as I have already intimated, a
commodity, and, as such, an article of trade. If I am right in this
notion, then labor must be subject to all the laws and principles of
trade, and not to regulations foreign to them, and that may be totally
inconsistent with those principles and those laws. When any commodity is
carried to market, it is not the necessity of the vendor, but the
necessity of the purchaser, that raises the price. The extreme want of
the seller has rather (by the nature of things with which we shall in
vain contend) the direct contrary operation. If the goods at market are
beyond the demand, they fall in their value; if below it, they rise. The
impossibility of the subsistence of a man who carries his labor to a
market is totally beside the question, in this way of viewing it. The
only question is, What is it worth to the buyer?
But if authority comes in and forces the buyer to a price, what is this
in the case (say) of a farmer who buys the labor of ten or twelve
laboring men, and three or four handicrafts,--what is it but to make an
arbitrary division of his property among them?
The whole of his gains (I say it with the most certain conviction) never
do amount anything like in value to what he pays to his laborers and
artificers; so that a very small advance upon what _one_ man pays to
_many_ may absorb the whole of what he possesses, and amount to an
actual partition of all his substance among them.
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