Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Charles Carey

Carey is smuggling a moral claim into what looks like a bland description of exchange: before we trade goods, we trade ourselves. By naming labor as the first commodity, he reframes the economy as a system built on human agency rather than on stuff. The line is doing double duty as economics and polemic, because once labor is the baseline commodity, any interference with how it is sold or directed starts to look like an attack on freedom itself.

The key move is his definition of liberty: not abstract rights, not patriotic sentiment, but control over the deployment of your work and the disposal of what it produces. That is a pointed rebuke to arrangements where those decisions are made elsewhere - by masters, landlords, or distant capital. In the mid-19th-century American context, Carey is writing in a world where slavery is a living contradiction and wage labor is becoming a disciplined factory routine. His formulation conveniently indicts slavery outright, yet it also lets him defend a political economy where the worker should, in theory, remain an owner of his choices and outputs.

The subtext is a boundary-drawing exercise: markets are acceptable only insofar as they preserve self-determination. He’s not celebrating labor’s commodification so much as trying to domesticate it, to insist that exchange must rest on consent and on a credible path from effort to ownership. It’s a definition of freedom calibrated to an industrializing society: if your labor can be commandeered, your “rights” are stage props.