David Ricardo argued that there was an "iron law of wages".

Marx criticized the Malthusian basis for the iron law of wages.

The Iron Law of wages.

In the nineteenth century, a belief in the iron law of wages led some socialists to reject trade unionism and strike action as ineffective.

Population Growth and the Labour supply have been explained in terms of the 'Iron Law of Wages'.

Iron law of wages, from Ferdinand Lassalle's Subsistence theory of wages (mid 19th century)

This is not the notorious iron law of wages, which predated Ricardo and is most commonly associated with the writings of Thomas Malthus.

This contradicted Malthus's Iron Law of Wages, in which wages could never rise beyond subsistence levels, and sparked a lengthy debate between the two men.

Some argue that his famous polemic with James Connolly showed him to have been an advocate of Lassalle's Iron Law of Wages.

The Manchester School's Iron Law of Wages as expounded by George Bush, self-styled expert in the dismal science....

In addition to Adam Smith's legacy, Say's law, Malthus theories of population and Ricardo's iron law of wages became central doctrines of classical economics.

Several authorities consider that Ricardo is the source of the concepts behind the so-called Iron Law of Wages, according to which wages naturally tend to a subsistence level.

In Smiths's opinion, "subsistence wages or Iron Law of Wages" i.e., the lowest wage upon which a worker and his family can survive is consistent with a constant population.

He assumed that workers could be paid wages as low as was necessary for their survival, which was later transformed by Ricardo and Malthus into the "Iron Law of Wages".

Iron law of wages is a proposed law of economics that asserts that real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker.

Lasalle regarded state aid through political action as the road to revolution and opposed trade unionism, which he saw as futile, believing that according to the Iron Law of Wages employers would only pay subsistence wages.

Socialist critics of Lassalle and of the alleged iron law of wages, such as Karl Marx, argued that although there was a tendency for wages to fall to subsistence levels, there were also tendencies which worked in opposing directions.

According to Alexander Gray, Ferdinand Lassalle "gets the credit of having invented" the phrase the "iron law of wages", as Lassalle wrote about "das eiserne und grausame Gesetz" (the iron and cruel law).

On the contrary, many followed Malthus in believing that availability of food would always tend to limit population growth, and that the 'iron law of wages' would prevent the poor from achieving a standard of living allowing diseases of malnutrition to be banished.

This name itself is retrospective, based on the iron law of wages, which is the reformulation of Malthus' position by Ferdinand Lassalle, who in turn derived the name from Goethe's "great, eternal iron laws" in Das Göttliche.

Its theoretical basis was Thomas Malthus's principle that population increased faster than resources unless checked, David Ricardo's "iron law of wages" and Jeremy Bentham's doctrine that people did what was pleasant and would tend to claim relief rather than working.

Doctrines like "Property is but Robbery," "Everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost," the "Iron Law of Wages" and the "Facts is Facts" of the Gradgrinds were the phrases of the nineteenth century that assisted.

In accord with this "Iron law of wages", Lassalle argued that individual measures of self-help by wage workers were destined to failure and that only producers' cooperatives established with the financial aid of the state would make economic improvement of the workers' lives possible.

The iron law of wages, the assumed transition of every energetic worker to the ranks of wealth, the danger lest the natural ability of the worker to better his condition be sapped by giving to him that which his self-respect can better win--these became the unconscious assumptions of all economic discussion.

The law of rent explains why the iron law of wages consistently fails to predict actual wages: if there are highly productive land sites available free, wages will tend to be high, all things else being the same; if the only available free land yields little, wages will tend to be lower.