Ex-Cons make the Best CEOs and Presidents?

Is success in running a drug smuggling operation, or in achieving high rank in a street gang, predictive of success (with proper training) in business, or for that matter in high government office? Early indications are positive. I question the premise, though, of recruiting these future leaders from the prisons. Don't we want to recruit our future leaders of business, the CIA, Homeland Security, regulators, lobbyists, newscasters, and the Judiciary, from the ranks of pimps, whores, murderers, and bandits who have not been caught? Wouldn't they be our best bet, from a Darwinian meritocratic perspective?

Comments

[Jeremy Gregg]

The depths to which your satirical excoriations can cut away masks to expose folly are beyond the sight of even my prying eyes.

You are one of a kind, Phil.

[Phil]

The conscious model for this post was John Gay's The Beggars Opera, about a double bottom line social venture, run by a fencer of stolen goods who both served robbers and sold them to the hangman. The whole thing being a satire upon Walpole, then the Prime Minister.

[Jeremy Gregg]

You read too much, dear sir.

[Phil Cubeta]

A vast dumpster with layer upon layer of old books fermenting beneath the newspapers, magazines, and sacks of garbage.