Slots for everyone!

Dear Gary Piontkowski: So, you’re the King of Slots, or so I’m told. The slots that are going to save The Racing Industry and all of its jobs. If we don’t put the slots in, we are told, then all the people who already aren’t showing up to watch the horses and dogs run are going to not show up even more often. As the president of Plainville’s Plainridge Racecourse, you’re still pitching, even though walking into a slot parlor anywhere on the planet is like walking into what Dante would have come up with if he hadn’t been such a laff riot. Hundreds of the elderly Undead, tokens rattling in plastic cups, oxygen tubes up their noses, feeding the machines while wearing T-shirts reading “Jesus Is the Answer.” (I saw that one myself, at a casino in Mississippi.) Here’s a modest economic theory of my own – if your industry needs slot machines to survive, then your industry is already dead. But I’m willing to be persuaded. Maybe sucking the last lint-covered coin out of every pair of stretch pants in the country is the way to go. If slots can save the racing industry, why not all the others? Let’s put slot machines everywhere. The American steel industry has been gasping for decades. Now every new steel mill gets a slot parlor! The government gets out of the automaking business, and all the Ford plants come clamorously alive with the sound of ringing bells and whistling whistles. Have your people call my people.