PJ O’Rourke has been a reliable weathervane for decades now and here he utterly skewers the current political landscape:
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.
All I can add is that conservatives love lost causes. Makes them feel noble and unique. Well, they have quite the lost cause now. But the fatalism I hear coming from Republican quarters goes quite beyond even that. They have talked themselves into a complete state of victimhood, where meaningful autonomous action does not exist.
Perhaps they’ll purge themselves out of the political process. Good.
