This is an interesting thread. I want to raise a question about Smith that is relevant, I think. In the opening scene of Wealth, notice that the disposition to truck and barter is evidently a disposition to trade for the sake of trading - i.e. it is not, in the first place, instrumentally guided at all. Why not? I think the reason might be this: Smith argues that differences between people are the result, not the precondition, of trade and the division of labor. But then if we are all alike originally, there would be no obvious advantages to trade. This is why a love of trade for its own sake might be necessary - to get the ball rolling. I know this is a deviant interpretation, but what do people think? The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, in *The Mating Mind*, argues that much of what is distinctively human, including language and art may have had its origin in sexual selection - like the peacock's tale (he argues, actually, for mutual sexual selection in the human case.) So the "for-its-own-sake-ness" of much human activity, including, if Smith is right, trade itself, originally, may be not a bug, but part of the design. Kevin Quinn