Supply and Demand

Ron Liddle was whiling away the afternoon hours recently creating an "Unethical Investment Fund". In the 20 January number of The Spectator he reports on his results. Sure, the usual suspects are there: McDonald's, Philip Morris, and assorted naughty oil companies. But I hadn't heard of David Lucas. Mr Lucas:

. . .makes gallows to be deployed by Third-World African dictators -- Gaddafi and Mugabe, for example. He does a terrific trade despite resembling one of the backwoods people in the film Deliverance. He does multiple gallows, too, so you can hang five dissidents in one go. All his products are exquisitely wrought from the finest English oak. "The beauty of it is," Mr Lucas told a rather unhappy reporter from the Guardian, "you can use it over and over gain."

Mr Lucas's company is, it appears, not publicly traded.

Yet.

Now that word has reached the public, though, we shouldn't have long to wait for the IPO.