How About a Hand for Professor Guff

           Professor Guff sat in front of his computer, fingering keys with his right hand: crunching numbers, sorting data. Where did I go wrong? he thought. President Boon had assigned him an impossible task: eliminate crime in The United Regions of Amexinada. After six "extremely successful” terms in office (the President’s own words), the leader of the “free world” decided to tackle the one problem which seemed so far out of his reach: the steadily rising crime rate. He handpicked Professor Guff to lead the charge.

            Professor Guff’s solution was as simple as the problem was difficult. Start with theft, because if you can’t eliminate the easiest problem first, then how can you be expected to eliminate the more complex ones. And his solution to theft was as old as society: if one gets caught stealing—anything, from a piece of penny candy to a luxury automobile—they would lose their left hand. Chopped off at the wrist. Hung from the branches of a large Sycamore at the Capital, for everyone to see. With the prospect of losing a hand, people would certainly stop stealing. And they did. It worked. For a while…

            At first, the rate of theft dropped significantly, but then something very peculiar happened. The hands began disappearing, leaving the branches of the Sycamore as bare as a tree that wasn’t being used to hang human hands from. The hands had become collector’s items, and with the increasing decrease in theft, their value was skyrocketing. Suddenly, with no hands left in the tree, everybody wanted a hand of their own.

            The theft rate began rising again, mostly due to the theft of human hands. A thief would chop off the hand of their victim to sell on the black market, and in return, would lose their own hand as punishment. Some swindlers even went as far as chopping off their own hands in order to sell them, because after all, there was a good chance they would lose it anyway. Over time, human hands became society’s number one object of desire. Everybody wanted one. Needed one. But once everybody got one, their value fell through the floor, leaving them practically worthless.

            So, now every citizen of Amexinada owned their own hand, which also meant that every citizen of Amexinada was missing a hand of their own. This irony did not escape Professor Guff as he sat in front of his computer, staring at the nub that ended his left forearm. He scanned his eyes across his desk, first to a large jar that contained a human hand floating in formaldehyde, and then to his monitor. He couldn’t help but laugh as he looked over the final conclusion written across the screen: the theft rate was exactly the same as it had been when President Boon asked him to eliminate crime.