labor demand to wage rates. History The 256th couplet of Tirukkural, which was composed at least 2000 years ago, says that "if people do not consume a product or service, then there will not be anybody to supply that product or service for the sake of price". According to Hamid S. Hosseini, the power of supply and demand was understood to some extent by several early Muslim scholars, such as fourteenth-century Syrian scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, who wrote: "If desire for goods increases while its availability decreases, its price rises. On the other hand, if availability of the good increases and the desire for it decreases, the price comes down." Shifting focus to the English etymology of the expression, it has been confirmed that the phrase 'supply and demand' was not used by English economics writers until after the end of the 17th century. In John Locke's 1691 work Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money, Locke alluded to the idea of supply and demand, however, he failed to accurately label it as such and thus, he fell short in coining the phrase and conveying its true significance. Locke wrote: “The price of any commodity rises or falls by the proportion of the number of buyer and sellers” and “that which regulates the price... [of goods] is nothing else but their quantity in proportion to [the] Vent.” Locke's terminology drew criticism from John Law. Law argued that,"The Prices of Goods are not according to the quantity in proportion to the Vent, but in proportion to the Demand." From Law the demand part of the phrase was given its proper title and it began to circulate among "prominent authorities" in the 1730s. In 1755, Francis Hutcheson, in his A System of Moral Philosophy, furthered development toward the phrase by stipulating that, "the prices of goods depend on these two jointly, the Demand... and the Difficulty of acquiring." It was not until 1767 that the phrase "supply and demand" was first used by Scottish writer James Denham-Steuart in his Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy. He originated the use of this phrase by effectively combining "supply" and "demand" together in a number of different occasions such as price determination and competitive analysis. In Steuart's chapter entitled "Of Demand", he argues that "The nature of Demand is to encourage industry; and when