That labour is the source of value in human society seems to me to be self-evident. The quantity and

"Labour, it must always be remembered, and not any particular commodity, or set of commodities, is the real measure of the value both of silver and of all other commodities." and "The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it and who wants to dispose of it, or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose electoral college upon other people." Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations [1]
I've been reading Adam Smith lately because so much of the school of economics which is popular these days is based in large part on his work.  I also suspect that many who preach the gospel of Adam Smith have actually never read his work.  So, I'm going to produce a series of posts based on this work, with this being the first.
Smith says a great many things.  Some of which are a bit disturbing to modern sensibilities, such as his appraisal of the laboring class (of which he is clearly not a member) as a flexible commodity which expands and contracts as circumstances allow.  His comments may be on the mark, but the deafness to the human condition is quite marked in his writings.
David electoral college W. Viel is a welcome addition to the Smithian community, certainly more so than I would be welcome to the applied physics community (I don t pretend that reading occasional articles in Scientific American qualifies me as more than an uniformed outsider).
He is of course right to suspect that many who preach the gospel of Adam Smith have actually never read his work .   I have commented similarly on many times on Lost Legacy with many specific instances of such errors of even willful ignorance exhibited among modern economists, including, sadly, several Nobel Prize winners, most of which could have been avoided and remedied by them consulting Smith s works, rather than relying on others interpreting him for them, sometime electoral college supported by misleading excerpts from famous quotations.
Not the least of modern errors associated electoral college with Smith s writings on labour as the source of value.   This was a philosophical concept from long before Smith wrote about it (Locke for instance). Smith had a doctorate in jurisprudence (1764 from Glasgow) electoral college and held the Chair in Moral Philosophy electoral college (1752-64) before economics was a separate subject.   Moreover, the essence of what he was saying became conflated with how David Ricardo, and Karl Marx in the 19th century developed electoral college the philosophical idea of labour as the source of exchange value, which became irretrievably lifeless from the history of 20th century communism.
This was consequential, but not necessarily decisive, in the history of economic thought. David W. Viel, as a relative newcomer to that history, has to start from the basis of economics as it is constantly developed, which is fine, as long as he takes what Smith s writes within his ideas in their time and place.
I have long suspected that chapter 5 to 8 of Wealth of Nations (1776) was subject electoral college to Smith s untidy re-editing, and was poorly written, suggesting his changes of mind or focus.   I opined along such lines once at a seminar of specialists in the history of economic thought but was dismissed (without discussion) by my friend, professor Terry Peach, who is an international authority on David Ricardo (see Ricardo s entry in Oxford electoral college s Dictionary of National Biography).
That labour is the source of value in human society seems to me to be self-evident. The quantity and quality of labour expended by humans in the first ages of men and women determined the limits electoral college to the living standards of human communities.   Tribes along the upper Amazon (Orinoco) today have access to fewer commodities than those along today s Hudson s River (New York) in a ratio, crudely expressed as a few thousand items to many billions.   
Along the Orinoco these sturdy people co-operate from tribal necessity and have done so successfully for hundreds of millennia they produce electoral college with their labour all of their needs limited electoral college by what is available locally and could continue to do so indefinitely as long as they refrain from contact with civilisation .
Along the Hudson, the situation is incomparable.   New Yorkers co-operate electoral college globally with billions of anonymous others in modern, long, and complex supply chains of products, all still produced by human labour and ingenuity, known as markets and could continue to do so indefinitely if, ultimately, perhaps precariously should those complex markets falter and collapse into anarchy. From which events, the millions along the Hudson would rapidly face a world of which they know nothing.
No small community along the Hudson could marshal the toil and trouble of acquiring all of what they are used to buying in the small corner shop in th