Thou Shalt Make Money

By CALVIN TRILLIN

It is a rule of free enterprise that even disaster is a commercial opportunity. Analyzed unemotionally, an earthquake is a natural phenomenon that, among other things, creates potential construction contracts. We can take it for granted that the airplane hijackings of the 1970s produced, along with a great deal of fear and anguish and even death, any number of baggage X-ray machine millionaires. I believe it was Adam Smith himself who said, "There's always going to be a buck in it somewhere for somebody."

For a few tantalizing weeks this spring, the manufacturers of gun safety locks seemed to have hit the jackpot: the gun-control bill passed by the Senate in the wake of the Littleton shootings mandated that all new handguns be equipped with safety locks. Then the House, having decided that the real problem was not easy access to guns but the willingness of our society to expose children to such expressions of godlessness as Natural Born Killers and the theory of evolution, defeated the gun-control bill.

Naturally, I felt for the safety-lock people--although I didn't waste a lot of sympathy on those officers of a Florida firm called Saf T Lok Inc. who, according to the Washington Post, sold off gobs of their stock after it had tripled in a week. They had taken advantage of another rule of free enterprise: the commercial opportunity does not even have to exist if the market thinks it might exist.

So is anyone going to make a buck out of this thing now? After looking over a separate bill passed by the House, I believe we can count on some entrepreneur somewhere trying to decide whether to instruct a factory in Thailand to start turning out wall plaques of the Ten Commandments.

Giving school districts the right to display the Ten Commandments was part of the legislation passed in the House. But a high school principal wouldn't simply make a copy of the Commandments and post it on the bulletin board, next to a Stamp Club notice. No, a principal who wanted his students to absorb the Commandments well enough to prevent them from mowing down their classmates would require an attractive Ten Commandments plaque made of a genuine mahogany-like substance, with built-in hooks for easy mounting. Some company would have to supply that plaque.

There are risks in starting up production, of course; the Senate hasn't passed the legislation, and the Supreme Court threw out a similar law years ago. Also, wouldn't students who were encouraged to contemplate the Ten Commandments eventually get around to asking what, precisely, is meant by No. 7 (Thou shalt not commit adultery)? And wouldn't attempting to answer those questions be a form of sex education, just the sort of thing Tom DeLay and his troops believe started the trouble in the first place?

So could the plaques have only nine Commandments? Or would it make sense for the entrepreneur to start a company on the promise of huge Ten Commandment contracts and then dump his stock? That way, all the recent activity in the House would amount to more than dreary noise: at least somebody would have made a buck.