The Real Story of Wages — The Wealth of Nations

Smith opens with a simple claim: the produce of labour is the natural wage. In the earliest state, before private land and accumulated stock, the worker kept everything he made. Had that arrangement lasted, growing skill and the division of labour would have made goods cheaper in real terms even when some exchange prices looked higher. Rent and profit ended that world long before the great improvements arrived, so Smith stops imagining paradise and turns to actual wage bargains. Once landlords and masters take their shares first, most workers depend on an employer for materials and subsistence until the job is finished. The question is no longer what labour produces in the abstract, but what share survives after two prior deductions and a negotiation between unequal parties.