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Why did the hunters in the Wealth of Nations exchange beavers for deer?
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Chapter 14, The Philosophy of Prices, p. 146

 

Joan Robinson

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Assigning human personalities to animals is the chief trait of the pet owner—the doting dog-lover with his baby talk, the smug stay-at-home with a fat lump of fur on her lap who says, "Me, I'm a cat person," and the granny who puts her nose against the tin cage and makes kissing noises at her parakeet. Their affection is often tinged with a sense of superiority. Deer and duck hunters never talk this way about their prey, though big game hunters— Hemingway is the classic example — often sentimentalize the creatures they blow to bits and then lovingly stuff to hang on the wall.

 

Paul Theroux

 

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes — something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. ... I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.

 

Aldo Leopold

 

Exchange value forms the substance of money, and exchange value is wealth.

 

Karl Marx

 

The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

 

Milton Friedman

 

The vegan diet is obviously lacking whatever essential nutrient it is that makes people likeable. I’ve met and smelled members of Vegan Nation all across this land, from those who won’t eat lobster in Maine to those who won’t eat Mexicans in California. Few of these mutants seemed healthy, and down to the last platelet of meat-free blood, every one of them was a sanctimonious, judgmental, bourgeois whitebread Ass Face with more burbling hostility and barely concealed animal rage than any dozen drunken deer hunters.

 

Jim Goad