The way in which a dealer bought a pig from a peasant.
Excerpt from Reimann's The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism:
How cunning ingenuity and "private initiative" circumvent
official rules in a country under totalitarian rule
can be illustrated by the way in which a dealer bought
a pig from a peasant in Nazi Germany.
A peasant was arrested and put on trial for having
repeatedly sold his old dog together with a pig. When
a private buyer of pigs came to him, a sale was staged
according to the official rules. The buyer would ask the
peasant: "How much is the pig?" The cunning peasant
would answer: "I cannot ask you for more than the
official price. But how much will you pay for my dog
which I also want to sell?" Then the peasant and the
buyer of the pig would no longer discuss the price of
the pig, but only the price of the dog. They would
come to an understanding about the price of the dog,
and when an agreement was reached, the buyer got the
pig too. The price for the pig was quite correct, strictly
according to the rules, but the buyer had paid a high
price for the dog. Afterward, the buyer, wanting to
get rid of the useless dog, released him, and he ran
back to his old master for whom he was indeed a
treasure.
These "combination deals" have an interesting economic
aspect. The supplementary article which is sold
in order to make the whole transaction as legal as possible
is not always an old dog, but, in most cases, an
article which may have a certain usefulness in itself,
though not necessarily for the buyer. The purchase of
these supplementary articles therefore largely amounts
to waste of money, made necessary to facilitate the purchase
of other more urgently needed articles. Private
initiative was wont to seek economies which would increase
profits and the productivity of labor. Today, in a
society which is laboring under great hardships as the
result of scarcity of many essentials, the same goal can
be achieved only by purposely arranged waste.