When you catch a passel of crabs in, say, the Chesapeake, and you take them to market a dump out your ship load where they are sold by weight allowing for the occasional dead crab in the bunch over gross tonnage per daily exchange rate and that's capitalism at its best in the price and product department.
Down off at the boat barn, the new owner packages up the crabs in convenient bushel-sized baskets for sale to the public. And if, at the pace required by the floor supervisor, one tosses in a dead crab or two, it is still the market standard and acceptable if not abused. And sitting in the back of in the parking lot of a Saturday can stress any healthy crab, so that by the time you get home there may be as many as three -- or for some -- as many as four dead crabs and the customer will still likely go back and get another bushel the next Saturday or so.
But let's say, a bunch of spunky ex-frat boys working summers line the bottom of every bushel with dead crabs, and then then some pinstriped pinheads in $2,500 suits consolidate all the crab baggers and they decide to line the bottom of every bushel with two rows of dead crabs, and then some financial geniuses who've been mainlining the rhetoric of the rabid right and voracious laissez faire types in a desperate GOSPer attempt to consume all of the world's resources comes up with the brilliant idea of filling every bushel half full of dead crabs and selling it as a new improved product...
Then people stop buying crabs and start asking about the price of oysters.
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