Sam Low's Library - Martha's Vineyard

Golf Course - No! Amusement Park/Casino - Yes!
By Sam Low

Control human greed? No way! It's hardwired into our neurons. It's inherited from our years in the savanna, struggling to get the bend out of our knees. As soon as we mastered bipedal locomotion - we began to steal from our fellow travelers. No, greed is human all right. Senate investigations, attorneys general, grand juries, swat teams - all useless against such an ineluctable force. We can't control it. All we can do is even up the odds. The proper purpose of government is not to intervene in the exercise of normal human instincts - it's to provide a level playing field.

I propose a Federal Department of Greed Augmentation to provide every American with the means to achieve whatever ends they desire - as long as they exhibit the appropriate amount of selfishness. The DGA will have at its disposal the best that other government departments can offer - from drugs to furnish milquetoasts with the hostility and self-interest needed to compete effectively; to special "Greed Education" programs and "Greed as a Second Instinct" courses for school kids not endowed with sufficient personal ambition. Starting in preschool we'll test for appropriate levels of acquisitiveness and - if not found - we'll establish additional training programs to instill them. Nationwide SGTs will be given - Standard Greed Tests - to evaluate how we're doing. We'll create a National Greed Hall of Fame to celebrate overachievers, both individuals such as Bill Gates, Kenneth Lay, and Michael Milken as well as entire industries - oil and gas, computers, and stockbrokers. We might even, for a period of time, do away with all television programming and just broadcast advertisements. Come to think of it, we're pretty close to achieving that now. Here's one industry that may need no government interference at all.
We must fight the "Liberal-Peacenik-Axis" - all those who appeal to a nonexistent instinct for human generosity. Well, yes, generosity exists as a concept - but only to hold up its end of the semantic spectrum. You can't define greed without at least intellectually recognizing generosity as a remote possibility. But look at history, my friends. When and where did such a wimpy and retrograde instinct prevail?

Here's my action plan. When someone like Bill Gates seems about to overwhelm an entire industry, we will recognize that he's following his natural human instincts. He should be adulated as greed personified - placed way up in the Hall of Fame. Don't cut him down to size. Instead, bolster the insufficient greed of his competitors - the executives at Sun Microsystems and IBM, for example. Specially cloned CEOs, provided with a melange of interdisciplinary genetic material from luminaries like Richard Nixon (politics), General Douglas MacArthur (war) and John D. Rockefeller (business), will be airdropped into IBM's and SUN's boardrooms. The SEC will assist IBM and SUN to issue stocks for new spin-off companies to raise money to pay the options for the new and even more greedy administrators they'll need to compete with Microsoft. We'll provide free consulting with Arthur Anderson - the once famous accounting firm now about to go out of business but which we'll retain in a government netherworld for just such secret service. We won't neglect our towns and cities either. A small town losing a battle to outside greed agents, for example, is now faced with the unpalatable choice of either "quitting or joining." Bullpucky I say. DGA will augment the greed coefficient of local officials through workshops, injections, electroshock therapies - whatever - so they may win at the outsider's own game.
"Golf course you say? I trump that. What about an Amusement Park-Casino?"

Hah! That's the stuff.