The Lorax revisited, with an economic focus rather than an environmental one.

Check this out, and be sure to read the comments.   

Viewing the tale of the Lorax through an institutional lens, ruin is not the result of corporate greed, but a lack of institutions. The truffula trees grow in an unowned commons. (The Lorax may speak for the trees, but he does not own them.) The Once-ler has no incentive to conserve the truffula trees for, as he notes to himself, if he doesn't cut them down someone else will. He's responding to the incentives created by a lack of property rights in the trees, and the inevitable tragedy results.

I agree with one commenter that this makes me happier about reading The Lorax to my kids, mainly because the economic moral is much more nuanced than the famous, scraping-the-surface environmental one.

H/T The Volokh Conspiracy.