Wealth & Money Quote by Adam Smith

Smith is quietly detonating the cozy myth that wealth begins with money. By calling labor the "first price" and the "original purchase", he flips the usual story: cash isn’t the baseline reality of the economy; work is. Money, in this framing, is a late invention, a convenient receipt. The real payment that buys survival and comfort is time, exertion, skill, and the wear those things put on bodies.

The phrasing is doing strategic work. "Price" sounds neutral, almost mathematical, but "paid for all things" carries a moral chill: everything we call a commodity is anchored in someone’s effort, someone’s fatigue, someone’s constrained choice. Smith isn’t sermonizing, yet the sentence smuggles in an ethical pressure. If labor is the original currency, then markets aren’t pristine machines; they’re social arrangements built atop human input that can be undervalued, coerced, or unevenly rewarded.

Context matters. Writing in the 18th century, Smith is pushing back against mercantilist thinking that equated national wealth with hoards of gold and favorable trade balances. He’s also supplying an early foundation for what later thinkers (notably Ricardo and Marx) would formalize as labor-based theories of value. The subtext is radical in its calmness: if labor is the common denominator, then the glitter of elite consumption and the authority of "capital" look less like natural facts and more like outcomes of bargaining power and institutions.

It’s an economist’s sentence that doubles as a cultural correction: the economy is not money moving; it’s people working.