‘The sky is falling!” warned Chicken Little. The Little Red Hen was made of sturdier stuff. You could make a case that she invented supply-side economics, which is based on the premise that you gotta work if you wanna eat—in more formal terms, that production necessarily precedes consumption.

The Little Red Hen found a grain of wheat and somehow managed to grow a crop, asking her fellow creatures if they’d like to help with the planting, the cultivation, the harvest, the grinding of the flour and the baking of the bread....