P.J. O'Rourke: We Blew It: "What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. 'Jeeze, 230 pounds!' But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.
We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to--as it were--foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We've had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It's one more job we botched.
Although I must say we're doing good work on our final task--attaching the garden hose to our car's exhaust pipe and running it in through a vent window. Barack and Michelle will be by in a moment with some subsidized ethanol to top up our gas tank. And then we can turn the key."
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This is a bitterly funny and eloquent screed.
1 comment:
You know what the problem is with conservatism in America? There isn't any. We have a liberal party, the Democrats, and then this sort of mess on the right that contains just about every resentful malcontent you can imagine, but barely a sign of a real conservative.
The left is more or less doing its part to revive democracy, with practical problem solving, more participation, more community organizing, and making a much more plausible case than it has in a long time for traditional left-liberalism. The right for its part needs to rediscover personal responsibility, small government, individual liberty, and sound money, as well as the ability to sort the liberal push for practical problem solving out into stuff government should do and stuff government should not do. As it stands now, the American right fails in every respect.
Maybe they might try outsourcing their platform-writing to the British Tories?
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