Wages are of prime importance in any advanced economy such as ours. They affect us all far more than seems evidenced in our concern about them. Basic principles always have a way of seeming simple, yet they can no more be oversimplified than can the law of gravity or the listing of chemical elements be oversimplified. What is needed in our complex society of millions of products sold by millions of business units to over a hundred million traders through billions of transactions each year is to get back to simple economic principles. These are working tools for solving problems that seem more complex than they really are.