Honor the irreplaceable PJ O’Rourke – Orange County Registry

PJ O’Rourke, the great journalist and satirist who advocated freedom with humour, died Tuesday at the age of 74.

O’Rourke, born in Toledo, Ohio in 1947, came to a mix of conservatism and liberalism in the 1970s after a stint in his youth as a self-described left-wing hippie. left wing.

During his lifetime, O’Rourke was a prolific writer, writing more than 20 books and writing for publications ranging from The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair to The Weekly Standard.

Unlike many libertarians, O’Rourke’s method favors a seemingly radical concept of individual liberty based not on tedious economic explanations, but on sharp satires. sharp and humorous explanations of the state of things.

Many of O’Rourke’s quips are known even to those who have never particularly followed his work for many years.

For example:

• “Giving money and power to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

• “When buying and selling is controlled by law, the first things that are bought and sold are legislators.”

• “If you think health care is expensive right now, wait until it’s free.”

It is through cuts like these that O’Rourke misleads politicians and the spirit, the game of politics, and the institutions of government in a way that makes people reflect on how much trust they must have. put in such people and systems.

In his 1991 book, “The Congress of Whores,” O’Rourke lamented the malicious nature of government, noting that, among other things, “It tests the tropical oil in snacks our cars, tell us what kind of gas we can buy for our cars and how fast we can drive them, rate us on retirement, education and what’s on TV … ordered what we could sniff, smoke and devour and prank young men, take them to far places and tell them to shoot people they don’t I don’t even know . ”

For all that intrusion, however, O’Rourke notes, “the real problem is that government is boring. We can cure or mitigate the other evils Washington visits if we just do it.” can pay attention to Washington itself. But we can’t.”

O’Rourke’s libertarian solution is simple: keep the government from doing too much. But that’s not easy to do as the only people willing to do anything tend to just want the government to do more for them. And so the government continues to grow.

“Government is so boring that sometimes you wonder if government is intentionally boring,” he mused.

Decades later, these insights are still essentially true. The federal government has evolved considerably in the three decades since he wrote those works, but the vast majority of Americans are not only in the dark about even the basic plots of Washington, D.C., but also our state, county and city governments, not to mention school boards or, you know, water districts, whatever that is.