Some say PJ ORourke is at his best when he's angry. Stick him in a European airport surrounded by condescending Belgian socialists he's a laugh a minute. Stick him at the bottom of a Rugby Scrum sized South Korean election riot and you'll wet yourself from laughter.
"Peej" has looked at the the current state of 'Conservative' America and he seems pretty mad to me:
Anyway, it's no use blaming Wall Street. Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like scolding defensive linemen for being big and aggressive. The people on Wall Street never claimed to be public servants. They 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 2 percent return. (Although that sounds pretty good at the moment.)
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.
Compliments of "The Weekly Standard", and currently mourning the loss of our initiative, ladies and gentlemen... PJ ORourke.
2 comments:
>>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. <<
That’s interesting. I've often viewed it similarly -- that the free market follows the same laws that gravity does -- the laws of nature. That is, the market has a natural set of laws of its own which are unchangeable, and unbreakable – a Tao of Markets, if you will – just like gravity, which influences planetary orbits and causes the seasons and influences the tides and climates. You can no more change the laws of the free market, through government policy, than you can change the laws of gravity. Of course that might not stop some from TRYING.
Of course, it’s all much funnier the way P.J. says it.
It would be nice if they could legislate gravity - it would be much easier to lose weight...
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