Bradley,
I wasn't characterizing any one profession; notice that I used WE in my comment about class warfare. Like Kavanaugh and Young, I hold the superintendent in very high regard. He is probably the most critical employee of a golf operation.
As to fixing blame, it certainly is not a guy like Silverstein. He merely shared his knowledge and expertise.
I opined earlier that the consumer is the culprit if one existed. And the problem is not just related to golf. Look what we expect the government to do but are unwilling to pay for. At the same time we demand free healthcare, education, and a pristine, carbon-less environment, we want a middle class tax cut while shifting the costs to the "rich" 5%. Unfortunately, money for nothing (and chicks for free) exists only in lyrics and Hollywood scripts.
Someone noted earlier that golf was a lagging economic indicator. I would argue that perhaps the opposite is true, that it leads. We've been talking about golf's downfall as long as I've been on this site, and much of the time the economy was going along just fine. The industry's problems began many years ago though perhaps these were masked on the supply side by plentiful, hot Wall Street money. .
Personally, I think our market economy has been subjected to continuous impediments beginning as late as the Great Depression, and greatly accelerated under Johnson, Nixon, Bush I, Clinton, and now Bush II. World War II followed by the feminist movement brought some respite by introducing women into the mainstream workforce to generate an additional source of income for many families.
Technological innovation, primarily computers, robotics, the Internet, and telecommunications, have further served to reduce the noise placed into the economic system by the collective. Perhaps there is another scientific miracle just right around the corner- the repeal of the laws of physics might be nice; maybe Mr. Gore has recently discovered perpetual motion or his venture capital fund has made it possible to turn hydrogen into fuel without exerting more energy to do so than it creates. Hopefully we are not going back to the days of child labor in order to make ends meet.
The questions that face not just the golf industry but our country as well are very difficult. Have societal demands and their costs reached critical mass such that our economic arteries are clogged up? Is there a solvent in the horizon that can partially open these so that we can live to fight another day? Can higher taxes on the productive, bailouts for the failed, and the further economic burdens of socialized medicine, carbon-less energy policy, and the Big Labor agenda be anything other than, metaphorically, pouring concrete directly into the heart of the economy?
Someone here suggested that the golf industry's current problems might be a good thing. Depending on one's definition of a "purist" and how far we may wish to go back in the game's history, perhaps the devolution of the game to its roots is something to celebrate. Personally, I don't like lost balls nor am I inclined to stuff them myself, so I doubt that I'll be heading down to Camp Pendleton and try to play my way up from the surf to the Five. However, I might be willing to pay a small fee to watch Naccarato and Stamm play such a match.