P. J. O'Rourke. Excerpt(s) from Don't Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards, copyright c 2010 by P. J. O'Rourke.



P.J. O'Rourke on



The Free Market Is a Bathroom Scale
The free market is the greatest repository of our freedoms. Economic freedom is the freedom we exercise most often and to the greatest extent. Freedom of speech is important—if you have anything to say. I've checked the Internet; nobody does. Freedom of belief is important—if you believe in anything. I've watched reality TV and I can't believe it. Freedom of assembly is important—if you're going to an assembly. Most people are going to the mall. And, at the mall, they exercise economic freedom.



The free market is not a creed or an ideology that political conservatives, libertarians, and Ayn Rand acolytes want Americans to take on faith. The free market is simply a measurement. The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That's all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can't pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can.
The free market gives us only one piece of information, but it's important information. We ignore it at our peril, the way the leaders of the old Soviet bloc did. They lost the cold war not just because of troops or tanks or Star Wars missile shields. Even Reagan and Thatcher couldn't win the cold war by themselves. They needed allies. And the allies were Bulgarian blue jeans. The Soviets lost the cold war because of Bulgarian blue jeans. The free market was attempting to inform the Kremlin that Bulgarian blue jeans didn't fit, were ugly and ill-made, and nobody wanted them at any price. People wouldn't wear Bulgarian blue jeans—literally not to save their lives. But the Kremlin didn't listen. And the Berlin Wall came down.



The class struggle is over. The social class known as *******s won
Supposedly there are unconscious, involuntary, or automatic conspiracies that history engages us in, such as the Marxist class struggle. It's over. The social class known as *******s won. . . . There are always groups of people upon whom to blame things: the Flemish if you're a Walloon, the Walloons if you're Flemish, both of them and the rest of the dorks in Brussels if you're an EU citizen. But there's no group of people upon whom
to blame everything, except in a free and democratic society where we can, with confidence, blame everything on ourselves.
***
And what about ourselves? We're individuals—unique, disparate, and willful, as anyone raising a houseful of little individuals knows. And not one of these children has ever written a letter to Santa Claus saying, "Please bring me and a bunch of kids I don't know a pony and we'll share."

Ready for Democracy?
We know nothing about where political systems come from. We don't even know where they don't come from. And considering the shiftless, slave-trading, bed-hopping, debt-ducking (and that's just Thomas Jefferson) nature of America's founding fathers, who also included rum-soaked bunkum merchants and Indian-massacring land swindlers (and they all oppressed women and weren't vegans) we should be careful about saying that certain societies or nationalities or religious persuasions aren't "ready for democracy."



Delving in muck and killing each other
Mankind has made improvements in living conditions over the past couple of million years. (Some people don't think so. To those people I say: dentistry.) The improvements that have been good for everyone are those that have increased the dignity of the individual—have given the individual broader scope, greater self-accountability, and more authority over everything in the world (except other individuals who have the authority to tell the first individual to butt out).
Judaism provided individuals with one God and one law before whom all men are equal regardless of wealth or rank. Christianity pointed out that every individual has precious intrinsic worth, even the most lowly among us such as those we vote for in the New Hampshire presidential primary. The growth of trade and private enterprise let individuals acquire autonomy and material goods by means other than delving in muck and killing each other. And the industrial revolution allowed millions—now billions—of individuals to lead a housed, clothed, and fed life. (Albeit with some unfortunate side effects like the Prius.)



Redistribution is where the political fun begins
In the makeup of a halfway decent political system, the quality of freedom (including the free market), the quantity of individuality, and the fact of redistribution are fair assumptions, I assume. Redistribution is where the political fun begins. How much? Of what? To whom? By which means? And where the hell do we get it from?
This is the crux of the liberal versus conservative argument in modern democracies. Let us say that the argument is "Does size matter?" and that liberals and conservatives are bickering about the amount of redistribution to be done. This isn't quite true but it's close enough for government work. Let us say further—liars though we may be—that both the left and the right mean well and that each wants "what is good for everyone." Redistribution still causes a huge fight. People are never going to agree about it. The quarrel will go on forever. And let's hope it does. An end to the argument would be horrible. The moment when we're all in accord about every social benefit with which we all will be provided forever is the moment when we achieve perfect "fairness."
I know a great deal about fairness, because I have a twelve-year-old daughter. That is her constant refrain: "It's not fair! It's not fair! It's not fair!"
I tell her, "You're cute. That's not fair. Your family is pretty well-off. That's not fair. You were born in America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better get down on your knees and pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you."



The Virtue of Sharing
A few nonpartisan (or, at least, not very political) observations can be made about redistribution. When any authority of any kind undertakes to redistribute goods and services we can be sure we'll be told that "what goes to the poor" has "come from the rich." Those who are indignant at the rich say so; the indignant rich do too. But who's rich? You are. To someone who lives in the slums of Karachi you're rich. I don't care if you're driving a 1990 Geo Tracker, haven't had a job since Cher was a babe, and your trailer home just burned down because your wife's boyfriend's meth lab exploded, you're rich. You're farting through silk as far as that person in Karachi who's looking for a job as a suicide bomber is concerned. Accusing someone of being rich is like accusing someone of adultery in the Gospel of St. John. Let he who is without anything anybody wants cast the first vote.
We all praise the virtue of sharing, but perform the following thought experiment about the sharing process. Imagine that your family is matched, by lot, with five other families and that the resulting half dozen familial units must pool their resources and come to mutual decisions about how those resources are to be allocated. For a brief moment that sounds like an intriguing combination of reality TV and the 1960s. Then we recall what an awful combination reality TV and the 1960s would have been. The Real Housewives of Charlie Manson.
Since we've already determined that you're rich, let's institute a requirement that the other five families be poorer than yours. And why is a small bad idea like this supposed to get better if you make it bigger? It stinks in your hometown. How is it going to smell nationwide?
Nor does the idea improve if you shrink it. How small would that pool of resource sharers need to be to make it practical, sane, and unstupid? Even within our immediate families we don't share our resources fairly (as my children are totally fond of pointing out). And in most families collective decision making doesn't rise above the level of hamster purchase. (My dogs favor having the hamster—with a side of fries.) What if the shared resource pool is restricted to only a married couple? Surprise divorce filing! And your spouse's lawyer just called to say you're rich.
Another rule of redistribution can be extrapolated from a family circle: Never do anything to (or for) a stranger that you wouldn't do to (or for) your bum brother-in-law. (I'd like to note here that I have a perfectly respectable set of brothers-in-law: an engineer, an industrial designer, a medical researcher, and a deceased career military man. So it's your bum brother-in-law we're talking about.)
You can't let your sister and her five kids by six different fathers starve, but you can try to make her husband get a job. And you can (at least in my state) run him off at gunpoint if he beats her.
Or say your brother-in-law isn't a bad guy, just drunk and crazy and high on drugs. He's living on the street and talking to people who don't exist. Do you pick him up by his collar and belt, heave him in the back of your car, and get him some help? Or do you respect his civil rights and let him freeze in doorways and get run over by a bus? Yeah, I'm for the bus myself. But you know the kind of fit your sister is going to pitch at the funeral, screaming and yelling, and that will get your mom started and you'll never hear the end of it.



Confusing Politics with Halloween
The best way to have a good political system is to avoid politics. But political disengagement deprives us of opportunities for *****ing at politicians and pushing them around. This is occasionally useful and always a pleasure. In our democracy we don't get in trouble by trying to make politicians mad. We get in trouble by trying to make them like us. Our political system goes to hell when we want it to give us things.
There are certain things we may reasonably demand of our political system, of course. But most of these things are "negative rights"—rights to be left alone. And often it's the political system itself that's violating those rights. The most sensible request we make of government is not "Do something!" but "Quit it!"
As for our "positive rights" and the goodies we expect to gain with them, we're confusing politics with Halloween. Politicians don't mind. They love devising programs of incentives and disincentives for the populace. Trick or treat! And a ghouls and goblins political system is fine for those among us who are really scary. But, for the rest of us, don't be surprised if we go house to house—White House to House of Representatives to Senate—and, ringing doorbells as furiously as we may, get nothing but healthy fruit.
If there's something we want, politics shouldn't be our first resort. Politics is all taking, no making. Whatever politics provides for us will be obtained from other people. Those people won't love us.
And we don't love them. When we gain our ends through political takings it's because of a certain bad idea. What we're thinking leads to death, destruction, and taxes. What we're thinking is that we live in a zero-sum world: there is a fixed amount of the things I want, and when anybody has anything I want they've taken it from me. If you get too many slices of pizza, I have to eat the Domino's box.
This is a particularly poisonous idea because for most of history it was true. There may have been a prehistorical moment when all we had to do to get more mammoth meat was walk over the next hill and avail ourselves of some unpopulated spot such as Europe. But civilization is based on land for grazing and crops. There's only so much land. If I'm on it, you're off. That's the world's shortest history of warfare, and probably also the history of class conflict, serfdom, slavery, nationalism, racism, and genocide.



How shooting convenience store clerks stimulates the economy
Politicians work themselves into a lather of rationalization about the benefits of government spending. In this they are aided by the more vile kinds of economists such as Paul Krugman and the late John Kenneth Galbraith. Using liberal political-economic reasoning I can prove . . . anything. I can prove that shooting convenience-store clerks stimulates the economy.
Jobs are created in the high-paying domestic manufacturing sector at gun and ammunition factories. Additional emergency medical technicians, security guards, health care providers, and morticians are hired. The unemployment rate is lowered as job seekers fill new openings on convenience-store night shifts. And money stolen from convenience-store cash registers stimulates the economy where stimulus is most needed, in low-income neighborhoods where the people who shoot convenience-store clerks go to buy their crack. I am simply flabbergasted that the Democratic majority in the House and Senate isn't smoking crack and shooting convenience-store clerks this very minute, considering all the good it does.



"Free-range" Politicians
Morality is important to politics. Important is not the same as necessary. You can remove morality from politics like you can remove the head from a chicken and they'll both keep going, politics much longer than the chicken. Politics will continue to run around, flap, and spurt blood forever without its morality.
What's important about morality in politics is us. We own the chicken farm. We must give our bird-brained, featherheaded politicians morals. Politicians love to think of themselves as "free-range" but they do not have the capacity to hunt or gather morals in the wild. If we fail to supply them with morality, politicians begin to act very scary in the barnyard. These are enormous headless chickens and they have nukes.



Moses and the 10,000 Nice Ideas
Say that the virtuous "new man" imagined by politics comes to rule over heaven and earth. Call him "Ben." Or call him "Jerry." He rewrites Genesis so that Adam loses all of his ribs, and half his backbone, to ensure that the Garden of Eden is fully representative
of the spectrum of human sexuality. Endangered species go first into the ark. (Now, how do we get those brontosaurs out of the vegetable garden?) Moses is called to the mountaintop to receive the Ten Thousand Nice Ideas urging the Israelites to be "in touch with their feelings" and deploring speech that's "hurtful and divisive." Joshua blows his horn and the residents of Jericho join in on recorders and tambourines. There's no capital punishment in the Judea of Pontius Pilate, Jesus does three to five in imperial minimum security. He writes The Gospel of Prison Reform and starts a socially conscious, sustainable small business by using his heavenly powers to invent refrigeration. The symbol of universal salvation is ice cream. We are blessed with an infinite number of cleverly named delicious flavors. But we are required by law to use someone else's tongue to lick them.



I believe in original sin, and politics may be its name
I believe in original sin, and politics may be its name. But unlike some of my fellow Republicans, I do not believe God is involved in politics. Observe politics in America. Observe politics around the world. Observe politics down through history. Does it look like God is involved? When it comes to being a political activist, that would be the Other Fellow.



Paying for Everything Twice
And you do. The financial bailout, for example. You paid for it once when you discovered that your retirement savings consisted of nothing but half a chocolate bunny from last Easter, three paper clips, and a dried-up Sharpie. Then you paid for it again with your tax dollars and with the permanent damage done to the American economy when the government pawned everything in the nation because your tax dollars weren't enough to pay for the bailout.
Likewise with the economic stimulus. You write checks to cover your mortgage payment, utilities, insurance premiums, car loan, basic cable, Visa, MasterCard, and American Express bills, and you hand fistfuls of cash to your children and turn them loose in the Abercrombie & Fitch store. Think you're done stimulating the economy? Think again. The president of the United States is also on an economically stimulating spending spree, and he's paying for it with a lien on all the future job and business opportunities that your children will have. This means they won't have them. I hope that your kids, once they've gotten their MBAs, enjoy stocking shelves at the Dollar Store.



In for a Penny, in for $16 Million
How much would you think it would cost the U.S. mint to produce a penny? You're half right. To manufacture this little item of pocket clutter is about twice as expensive as its nominal value. And its nominal value is nominal indeed. A penny will not buy a penny postcard or a pennywhistle or a piece of penny candy. It will not even, if you're managing the U.S. mint, buy a penny.
The problem is the cost of zinc, which is what a "copper" is actually made of. For the past twenty-five years a pennyweight of copper has been worth considerably more than a penny. And we wouldn't want our money to have any actual monetary value, would we? That would violate all of the economic thinking that has been done since John Maynard Keynes. Therefore the United States began making pennies out of less expensive zinc with a thin plating of copper for the sake of tradition and to keep Lincoln from looking like he'd been stamped out of a galvanized feed trough. But then a rising commodities market drove up zinc prices. (Maybe China needs a lot of zinc for, oh, I don't know, stabilizing the lead paint on Barbie dolls so that our girls don't start beating their girls on math tests, or something.)
I learned about the penny's cost overrun in one of those little five- or six-column-inch filler items that are now the mainstay of the once-mighty wire services. This particular squib ran a while ago in the Boston Globe, but I didn't come across it until recently. I buy the Globe only for the comics, the Sudoku, and to train the puppy. I was arranging the sheets of newsprint on the kitchen floor, being careful to keep the editorial pages facedown. (I don't want to give any encouragement to the Boston terrier's natural inbred liberalism.) Anyway, there was the penny article. I suppose, as a fiscal conservative and—at least until the cocktail hour—a responsible citizen, I should have been indignant. But, to tell the truth, I was hopping about with glee. (Something that, by the way, is not advisable in a kitchen's puppy-training area.) You see, there are times when even we staunchest of libertarians lose our faith, or our faithlessness. That is to say, we lose our faith in our loss of faith in government. We catch ourselves thinking things like, "Whoa, what about the subprime mortgage market? That sub part was one moldy hoagie. Maybe there should be more government regulatory oversight." Or, "Wait a minute, just because I've been to the emergency room for string trimmer injuries six times in the past two years is no reason for my health insurance to be canceled. Since when is stupidity a preexisting condition?" Libertarians are only human. When we're tired and stressed we're occasionally vulnerable to the kind of easy self-gratification and delusional thinking that leads to government dependency. But then comes a story like the penny costing two pennies and it's instant cold turkey. In for a penny, in for $16 million of wasted tax dollars spent to put eight billion pennies into circulation each year. Take care of the pennies and the pounds (of flesh extracted by the IRS) will take care of themselves. A penny for your thoughts, and I'm not just picking your brain; I'm offering a 100 percent return on investment. The good news is you have a lot more money than you thought you did. We all do. A quick survey of my home indicates that the average American household has something on the order of a million pennies stashed in coffee cans, cigar boxes, quart jars, kitchen junk drawers, children's piggy banks, under car seats, between couch cushions, plus the two pennies in my old loafers from junior high in a box in the attic. So it's new home theater–sized flat screen TVs all 'round as soon as we get done building our backyard zinc smelters.



On Moral Hazard
"Moral hazard" is the term economists use for a situation that reduces the incentive to avoid bad economic behavior. If you have an insurance policy for $1 million on a house that's worth $150,000, and you're behind on your mortgage payments anyway, you'll be less careful when lighting your gas grill. In fact you may drag your gas grill into the middle of the living room and light it there, adding some gasoline in case it doesn't catch.



Print-Journalist Bailout
Hello? Bailout people? Mr. Secretary of the Treasury? Aren't you forgetting somebody? Like me? I'm a print journalist. Talk about financial crisis! Print journalists may soon have to send their kids to public schools, feed dry food to their cats, and give up their leases on Honda Insights and get the Hummers that are being offered at such deep discounts these days. The print-journalism industry is taking a beating, circling the drain, running on fumes. Especially running on fumes. You could smell Frank Rich all the way to Wasilla when Sarah Palin was nominated in 2008. Not that print journalism actually emits much in the way of greenhouse gases. We have an itty-bitty carbon footprint. We're earth friendly. The current press run of an average U.S. big city daily newspaper can be made from one tree. Compare that to the global warming hot air produced by talk radio, cable TV, and Arianna Huffington. There are many compelling reasons to save America's print journalism. And I'll think of some while the bartender brings me another drink.