Ferdinand Lassalle
In Karl Marx's early writings of the 1840s, he was influenced by David Ricardo's theory of wages, which held that wages tended down to a subsistence minimum. This was the "Iron law of wages" coined by the socialist Ferdinand Lassalle. In "On the Question of Free Trade" (1847), Marx wrote: "Thus, as means are constantly being found for the maintenance of labor on cheaper and more wretched food, the minimum of wages is constantly sinking."