From Hobson's Choice Term coined by Ferdinand Lasalle (d.1864)
for the idea, then widespread among classical economists that
humans reproduce to exhaust their means of subsistence; hence,
if wages are increased, workers will have more children, who
will enter the labor force, and drive wages back down. This idea
is very old; it was mentioned by Richard Cantillon in his Essai
sur la nature du commerce en general (1755), and it was probably
commonplace by then: Men multiply like mice in a barn if they
have unlimited means of subsistence; and the English in the
colonies will become more numerous in proportion in three
generations than they would be in thirty in England, because in
the colonies they find for cultivation new tracts of land from
which they drive the savages. Cantillon and those who cited the
"Iron Law" have typically done so as an argument against any
measure taken to ease the misery of the poor.