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… is the opening paragraph, found on page 37, of Book I, Chapter IV [2] of the 1981 Liberty Fund edition [3] of Adam Smith’s monumental 1776 An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [4]:
When the division of labour has been once thoroughly established, it is but a very small part of a man’s wants which the produce of his own labour can supply. He supplies the far greater part of them by exchanging that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men’s labour as he has occasion for. Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.
DBx: Adam Smith died, at the age of 67, on this date in 1790.