"A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation."
-- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)
"Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconveniency to the society? The answer seems at first sight abundantly plain. Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged."
"It may be said that of this hard lot no one has any reason to complain, because it befalls those only who are outstripped by others, from inferiority of energy or of prudence. This, even were it true, would be a very small alleviation of the evil. If some Nero or Domitian were to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to death, it would not be any diminution of the injustice that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape. The misery and the crime would be that any were put to death at all. So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements."
-- John Stuart Mill, Chapters on Socialism, p. 204.
Costs are what must be given up to obtain a thing. "All costs are opportunity costs" (Paul Krugman, Essentials of Economics, 2008). The wages of labour are the opportunity cost of provisioning that labour, and the living wage is the minimum price to be paid for same. If your business cannot pay workers what they require to live, then what you are operating is not a business, but a charity, on behalf of the workers, to the benefit of the owners. If you can pay a living wage but don't, then it is simple coercion.
Smith, in the chapter quoted above, explains at length the circumstances in which labour is owed more than the minimum, worth while reading 241 years later.
What do so many of these thinkers (or any in all of history) have to say about machines that act of their own volition to complete tasks that render most or all human effort unnecessary?
