jungle

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.

jungle

Give Us All Your Money
Oh rend thy garments, America. Heap ashes upon thy head. We the generation of generations—triumphant in our multitudes, invincible, indomitable, insufferable—have come into our inheritance. Hereby we claim our birthright. Give us all your money.
The pittance that is a current Social Security payment was intended to maintain the decrepit retirees of yore in their accustomed condition of thin gruel and single-car garages. Such chump change will hardly suffice for today's vigorous sexagenarians intent on (among other things) vigorous sex in places like Paris, St. Barts, and Phuket. How can current Social Security allotments be expected to fund our skydiving, bungee jumping, hang gliding, and whitewater rafting, our skiing, golf, and scuba excursions, our photo safaris to Africa, bike tours of Tuscany, and sojourns at Indian ashrams, our tennis clinics, spa treatments, gym memberships, personal fitness training, and cosmetic surgery, our luxury cruises to the Galápagos and Antarctica, the vacation homes in Hilton Head and Vail, the lap pools, Jacuzzis, and clay courts being built there, and the his and hers Harley-Davidsons?
And we haven't even touched on the subject of Social Security's civil union life partner, Medicare. It won't take much skydiving, bungee jumping, hang gliding, and whitewater rafting before we all require new hips, knees, and elbows, fused spinal discs, pacemakers, and steel plates in our heads. The expense of these will be as nothing compared to the cost of our pharmacological needs. Remember, we are the generation that knows drugs. We know drugs and we like drugs. From about 1967 until John Belushi died we created a way of life based almost entirely on drugs. And we can do it again. Except, this time, instead of us trying to figure out how to pay for it all by selling each other nickel bags of pot, you the taxpayer will be footing the bill. And did I mention that we'll expect to be airlifted to the Mayo Clinic every time we have an ache or pain? Nothing smaller than a Gulfstream G-3, please.
So just give us all the money in the federal, state, and local budgets. Forget spending on the military, education, or infrastructure. What with Afghanistan, falling SAT scores, and the California freeway system buried in mud slides, it's not as if the military, education, and infrastructure are doing very well anyway. Besides, you don't have a choice. We are 80 million strong. That's a number equal to almost two-thirds of the registered voters in the United States. Do what we say or we will ballot you
into a condition that will make Haiti look like Ibiza (where we'll be staying).



Our Cars Became Appliances
Our cars that once were flashing swords have been beaten into dull plowshares. Cars have become appliances. Or worse. Nobody's ticked off at the dryer or the dishwasher, much less the fridge. We recognize these as labor-saving devices. The car, on the other hand, seems to create labor. We hold the car responsible for all the dreary errands to which it needs to be steered. Hell, a golf cart's more fun. You can ride around in a golf cart with a six-pack, safe from Breathalyzers, chasing Canada geese on the fairways, and taking swings at gophers with a sand wedge.



Government is so inefficient that it can't even get bribe taking right
Do the possessors of money wield too much influence at the polls? They do at the mall, doubtless likewise in voting booths. Yet the telecommunications industry, comprising some of America's richest corporations, is constantly pestered by government regulatory agencies while agriculture, making up 2.3 percent of the GDP, is lavishly subsidized. Government is so inefficient that it can't even get bribe taking right.



On Campaign Finance
What is the alternative to private financing of political campaigns? Only one alternative exists. Under a system of public financing of political campaigns, people trying to change the government would have to go to the government to get the money to try to change the government. Something a little East German about that?



The Family of Nations
So how is America doing as patriarch in the household of humankind? One way to gauge our standing with the relatives is: Do they all go to us asking for money? We're good on this count. We've displayed an open hand to all who come our way, and we've dropped hints that we'll even travel to them to provide largesse, be they as far away as Tehran or Pyongyang. We're the soul of generosity, as have been all Americans who've come before us since Woodrow Wilson (except for Calvin Coolidge, the piker). Never mind that the money belongs to our rich, nervous, high-strung aunt, the American economy. Auntie Con has been suffering from a bit of a breakdown lately. We've gotten our hands on her power of attorney and we're frittering away her wealth.
I hope we're not expecting our distant relations to be grateful. A hundred years ago when foreign aid was unthought of (except as tribute or bribe) we were a respected and admired country. After a century of philanthropy everyone hates our guts.
This should tell us something about spoiling the kids. That red-haired stepson Hamas, for example. We don't "bring him to the table" with some invitation to come home for the holidays (especially if the holiday is the anniversary of 9/11). We tell the little jerk to quit playing with his rocket launcher toys and get a job.
Estranged foster child Iran is off his medications again. How long before this bipolar psychopath pulls a Columbine among our slow-learner kin in the special education class that is Europe?
Speaking of Europe, Russia's out on parole, drunk, unemployed, and likely to kill some folks next door again soon.
Doddering grandma Great Britain still manages on her own. But are we going to help her with her shopping for anti-terror commitment and her cleaning up of lefty defeatists? Are we going to keep this special relationship special? Or are we going to stick Gram into EU assisted living?
And all those work-shy layabouts on the Continent, don't we understand that they're good-for-nothings? But we want that branch of the family tree's approval so badly that our president wears his Nobel Peace Prize medal to bed at night.



Political Muck
We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated. But the "French bread lines" for the banks, the "terrapin soup kitchens" for the investment firms continued to dispense charity without stint.
The sludge and dreck of political muck funds flowing to prosperous businesses and individuals grew deeper and more slippery and stank worse than ever with conservatives minding the waste treatment works of legislation.



100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Manhattan studio apartment
Never, since the Mayflower knocked the rock in Plymouth, has anything as noisome as the Farm, Nutrition, and Bio-Energy Act of 2008 been spread upon the land. Just the name says it. There are no farms left. Not like the one Grandma grew up on. "Farm" today means a hundred thousand chickens in a space the size of a Manhattan studio apartment. And if we cared anything about "nutrition" we would, to judge by the mountainous, jiggling flab of Americans, stop growing all food immediately.



Three Ways to Pay
Conservative politicians should never say to voters, "We can lower your taxes." Conservative politicians should say to voters, "You can raise our spending. You, the electorate can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs. We have three ways to pay.
"We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation's culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free reign to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back ten cents on the dollar.
"We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone's pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people's pockets hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most.
"And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechuan takeout."



Good as Cash
The financial crisis carried conservatism on its final trip to the recycling bin. For almost three decades we conservatives had been trying to teach average Americans to act like "stakeholders" in their economy. They learned. They cried and whined for government bailouts just like the billionaire stakeholders in Citigroup. Aid was forthcoming. Then average Americans learned the wisdom of Ronald Reagan's statement: "The ten most dangerous words in the English language are, `I'm from the federal government and I'm here to help.'" Ask a Katrina survivor.
The left had no idea what was happening in the financial crisis. And I honor their confusion. Joe Jerk down the road from me, with the cars up on blocks in his front yard, fell behind in his mortgage payments and the economy of Iceland collapsed. I'm missing a few pieces of this puzzle myself.
Under political pressure that never seemed to be noticed by conservatives, a lot of lousy mortgages, which couldn't be repaid, were handed out to Joe Jerk and his drinking buddies and all the ex-wives and single mothers with whom Joe and his pals have littered the nation.
Wall Street looked at the worthless paper and thought, "How can we make a buck off this?" The answer was to wrap it in a bow. Take a wide variety of lousy mortgages—some from the East, some from the West, some from the cities, some from the suburbs, some from shacks, some from mansions—bundle them together, and put pressure on the bond rating agencies to do fancy risk management math. The result was a "collateralized debt obligation" with a triple-A rating. Good as cash. Until it wasn't.



Blaming Wall Street
Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like blaming prostitutes for getting paid. The people on Wall Street never claimed, as even prostitutes might, to be public servants. Investment bankers took no oath of office. They're in it for the money. We pay them to be in it for the money. We don't want our retirement accounts to get a 3 percent return. (Although that looks pretty good at the moment.)



Complexity Is Fraud
This is one fundamental but sometimes forgotten principle of conservatism. It is a political principle, it is an economic principle, it is a principle of manufacturing, finance, and trade. It is a principle that should be kept in mind when you explain to your wife and the people of South Carolina that you disappeared for a week in order to hike the Appalachian Trail: Beyond a certain point complexity is fraud.



Attila the Hun
I am a little to the right of . . . Why is the Attila benchmark always used? Fifth-century Hunnish depredations upon the Roman empire were the work of an over-powerful centralization of authority with little respect for property rights, pursuing a policy of economic redistribution in an atmosphere of permissive social mores.
I am a little to the right of Rush Limbaugh. I'm so conservative that I could talk Ellen DeGeneres out of supporting gay marriage. Gays wed, they buy a house, they have children, they encounter the public school system. Then gays all vote Republican.



The '08 Election Explained
To sum up America's political situation, we made a mistake. In 2008 we were experiencing a polar ice cap and financial meltdown causing sea levels to rise and sending cold water flooding into Wall Street where the rapidly acidifying ocean was corroding our 401(k)s and releasing mortgage-backed securities full of hot air into the atmosphere until our every breath was full of CO2 especially when we exhaled, which should be banned when children are present lest their uninsured health care be harmed
by secondhand greenhouse gases that endanger plant and animal species (Republicans were declared extinct on January 20, 2009) leading to a shortage of green, leafy vegetables vital to the fight against America's growing epidemics of obese hunger and
housing foreclosures on the homeless.



The Fun-Suckers
Sucking the fun out of life has always been an important component of politics. The inventors of modern politics, the Puritans of Cromwell's parliamentary ilk, are rightly a byword for buzz kill and gloomocracy. The Puritans banned all theatrical performances because of the dangers of . . . they'd think of something . . . actors playing Mercutio and Tybalt having a sword fight in Romeo and Juliet without wearing safety helmets.
Creating alarms about salt content in restaurant food or energy sustainability in Yellowstone National Park expands the purview of government almost as well as war, without all the patriarchal, exclusionist, sexist heroism and hurtful, insensitive patriotic language. Gas prices frighteningly high? Declare a moral equivalent of Hiroshima. Arteries clogged? Pass a law requiring the chicken nugget fry basket to be dunked in boiling mint tea.
Raining on parades requires no skill or effort on the part of a politician. This is what draws people—and Democrats—into politics. All a politician needs is the upper-story window of public attention and the chamber pot of rhetoric. How else to explain that politicians get elected?
Being a poke-nose, a nanny-pants, and a wowser satisfies the need of the political class to feel self-important and powerful. Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the West Wing feel like the admiral of the Mongolian navy.



The Department of Tofu and Sprouts
Being a killjoy is not a strictly partisan matter. Long-lipped howler Republican drys teamed up with spigotbigot Democrat William Jennings Bryan to enact Prohibition. The Republican Party is home to bluenoses big enough to expand Mount Rushmore with a bust of Andrew Volstead. Republicans stick their snouts into other people's medicinal marijuana prescriptions and underpants (but not gun cabinets). And, when it comes to scolding foreigners and horning in on the governance of lesser breeds without the law, Republicans are a regular pain in the atlas. Meanwhile Democrats do have their pleasures—drinking bong water at Emily's List fund-raisers and so forth.
But it is the Democrats who've best learned to make political honey out of minding other people's beeswax. Not satisfied with mere bossy irritation of the public, Democrats have created whole branches of government—the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Welfare, the Department of Education, the Department of Tofu and Sprouts. Democrats have opened barrels of (USDA inspected!) pork sufficient to feed all of their highbinding and wire-pulling friends, relatives, and cronies, with table scraps left over for their public sector labor unions. Democratic wisenheimers have managed to get themselves elected Big Chief Itch-and-Rub of every worry and to be appointed Pharaoh of Fret for every concern. They are the party of Eliot Spitzer. And we the citizenry are Eliot Spitzer's wife.



The Greatest Statistical Danger to Americans
How are the Democrats going to demean and humiliate us next? What issue will the Democrats fasten upon as a threat to the commonwealth and a hazard to the planet? What busybody ordinance and ass-and-elbows regulation will be put upon the books for our own good?
It would be valuable to know the answer. It's important to find out what kind of private enjoyment or human felicity the Democrats are going to pass a law against. We could lobby to defeat it. (Although our best lobbyists are in jail.) We could battle it on principle. (Although our principles, if we ever had any, are on the wane. Witness the paltry vote against the confirmation of Timothy "I forgot taxes were the law" Geithner.) Or we could plan strategies to resist the oppression. (Dig hole behind garage. Buy enormous freezer. Bury the red meat.)
One way to make a prediction about what the Democrats will outlaw is to calculate the greatest statistical danger to Americans. That would be death. Statistically speaking there is a 1:1 rate of occurrence. But it's hard to build a constituency of dead people, even though they do vote in Cook County. Rahm Emanuel is, we are almost certain, one of the living dead. But whether this gives the White House a pro- or anti-death tilt remains to be seen.



The Secular Grail of the Killjoy
In fact, a better way to foresee what our government will attempt to constrain or forbid is to ask, "What would annoy the most people most often?" That is the true test of government intervention in life. The Secular Grail of the killjoy is a program or policy that combines the intrusion of the census, the depredations of income tax, the duress of school busing to achieve racial balance, the expense of Social Security, the nuisance of Medicare paperwork, the inconvenience of automotive smog testing, the pettiness of a congressional investigation, and the fine print on the label of flame-resistant children's pajamas.



On Our Big Fat Political Ass
Politics can't save us. Politics is the idea that society's ills can be cured politically. This is a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried. The salad is fried. So is the ice cream and cake. Your bottle of cabernet sauvignon is
rolled in bread crumbs and dunked in the deep-fat fryer. Hence our big, fat political ass.



The Meaning of Politics
Consider how we use the word politics. Are "office politics" ever a good thing? When someone "plays politics" to get a promotion, does he or she deserve it? When we call a coworker "a real politician," is that a compliment?



We're Stuck with Our Politics
We're stuck with our politics. The alternative is arbitrary law. We choose to be equal before the law instead. If we're equal before the law, we're equally entitled to try to shape the law. Are we equal to the task? Of course not. The democratic political process is like the process of our children going through adolescence. There's not much we can do to improve it and there's nothing we can do to stop it. We cannot, however, just declare ourselves to be apolitical any more than we can declare ourselves to be "aparental." Here are the car keys, son. Dad's stash is in the nightstand drawer. Why don't you take my ATM card while you're at it? See you when you're thirty.



Rachet-Jawed Purveyors of Monkey Doodle
Democracy means electing people. Politicians are the people who get elected. I've spent some time with politicians. I like politicians. I'm friends with politicians from both sides of the aisle. Politicians are fine until they stick their noses into things they don't understand, such as most things. Then politicians turn into rachet-jawed purveyors of monkey doodle and baked wind. They are piddlers upon merit, beggars at the doors of accomplishment, thieves of livelihood, envy-coddling tax lice applauding themselves for giving away other people's money. They are lapdogs of demagoguery returning to the vomit of collectivism. They are pig herders tending that sow who eats her young, the welfare state. They are muck-dwelling bottom feeders growing fat on the worries and disappointments of the electorate. They are the ditch carp in the great river of democracy. And that's what one of their friends says.



How to Keep Politicians Busy
Of course there's a lot of pent-up energy and aspirations in politics and politicians. And we do want to keep the political system busy and feeling fulfilled, lest politicians get loose in the neighborhood and do real harm.
I think we should provide politics with an important mission, something that will allow politicians an outlet for their love of bombast and glory seeking, that will get them outdoors and give them some exercise. Maybe the political system will slim down.
Fighting pirates is bipartisan. Fighting pirates is a consensus builder. Even the Democratic Party is not so inclusive that there's a pirate voting bloc that must be appeased. And if we have to gather all the hundred-foot yachts once owned by AIG executives and now in possession of the Troubled Assets Recovery Program and send these to the Horn of Africa to lure the Somalis from their pirate lairs, so be it.
What an improvement over the other challenges the political system faces. Pirates don't invest in hedge funds, credit swaps, or toxic mortgage debt. Major pirate financial institutions never collapse and require infusions of government funds, because pirates bury gold doubloons in treasure chests and leave us maps marked with an X so we can dig up the gold and replenish the Federal Reserve without recourse to painful tax increases. Plus, if pirates do want a bailout, just toss them a rusty bucket.
Pirates have no need of health care reform. Eye patches, peg legs, and hooks are available over the counter at pharmacies, lumberyards, and hardware stores. Other pirate maladies may be treated by shaving their bellies with a rusty razor. Pirate retirement communities are nearby, within easy walking distance. And the planks are wheelchair accessible.
Foreign policy is a moot point. Pirates are men without a country. Never mind that the country they're without is Somalia. "You call that a country?" is the expert assessment we will receive from those with knowledge of the region between Mogadishu and Djibouti. Thus pirates don't have to be sent off to the Hague to be sentenced to ninety days for genocide (time off for good behavior).
The use of pirates for political purposes has a long and happy history. The young Julius Caesar—inexperienced and previously elected to only minor public office—made his mark in the res publica by killing pirates. They captured him on a voyage to Rhodes. Caesar told the pirates that as soon as he was ransomed he would come back and slay every man jack of them, from captain to cabin boy. It will amaze modern politicians but Caesar kept his campaign promise.
Queen Elizabeth I, deft at courting public opinion, was hell on Spanish pirates, when she wasn't busy financing English pirates such as Sir Francis Drake.
Thomas Jefferson sent Stephen Decatur after the Barbary Coast pirates. It was a PR coup. The marines are still going on about "the shores of Tripoli." It worked out well for Decatur too. There's a whole town in Illinois named after him (more than can be said for a certain former junior senator from that state).
Our politicians should be warned, however, that the victory over the Barbary Coast pirates was frittered away in negotiations with the bashaw of Tripoli. These were conducted by striped-pants cookie-pusher Tobias Lear, U.S. consul general in Algiers. When Lear realized what a screw-up he was, he committed suicide (a protocol that may be worth reintroducing at the Clinton State Department). Therefore President Obama must not be allowed, as is his wont, to talk to the pirates. Pirates get to open their mouths only to taste cold steel.