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Then There Was Communism's Weak-tea Sister, Socialism. Socialists Maintained That We Shouldn't Take All The Money Away From All The People Since All The People Don't Have Money. We Should Take All The Money Away From Only The People Who Make Money. Then, When We Run Out Of That, We Could Take More Money From The People Who...hey, Wait! Where'd You People Go? What Do You Mean You're "tax Exiles In Monaco?"

-P. J. O'Rourke

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Then There Was Communism's

P. J. O'Rourke

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Then There Was Communism's Weak-tea Sister, Socialism. Socialists Maintained That We Shouldn't Take All The Money Away From All The People Since All The People Don't Have Money. We Should Take All The Money Away From Only The People Who Make Money. Then, When We Run Out Of That, We Could Take More Money From The People Who...hey, Wait! Where'd You People Go? What Do You Mean You're "tax Exiles In Monaco?"

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There Was Also A Hunger Strike In Front Of The National Press Club, Which Seemed An Odd Place To Have A Hunger Strike (a Cocktail Fast, Maybe). Although The Bangladeshis Were Savvy Enough To Know To Know That If You're Going To Pester Journalists, Don't Go To Where They Work: You'll Never Find Them There.

Detroits Industrial Ruins Are Picturesque, Like Crumbling Rome In An 18th-century Etching.

In Washington Journalists Can Afford To Live Almost As Well As People Who Work For A Living.

The Constitution Is An Equally Forthright Piece Of Work And Quite Succinct ... Giving The Complete Operating Instructions For A Nation Of 250 Million People. The Manual For A Toyota Camry, Which Only Seats Five, Is Four Times As Long.

We Like To Pile Language On Language. Hunter [ S. Thompson] Was An Influence On Me, No Doubt About It.

Anyway, No Drug, Not Even Alcohol, Causes The Fundamental Ills Of Society. If We're Looking For The Source Of Our Troubles, We Shouldn't Test People For Drugs, We Should Test Them For Stupidity, Ignorance, Greed And Love Of Power.

Money Is Preferable To Politics. It Is The Difference Between Being Free To Be Anybody You Want And To Vote For Anybody You Want. And Money Is More Effective Than Politics Both In Solving Problems And In Providing Individual Independence. To Rid Ourselves Of All The Trouble In The World, We Need To Make Money. And To Make Money, We Need To Be Free.

Never Be Unfaithful To A Lover, Except With Your Wife.

I'm Certainly Not Fearful.

When Adam Smith Was Being Incomprehensible, He Didn't Have The Luxury Of Brief, Snappy Technical Terms As A Shorthand For Incoherence.

Positive Rights Are The Right To Shelter, The Right To Education, The Right To Health Care, The Right To A Living Wage. These Things Are - These Are, I Would Call Them, More Properly, Political Rights Rather Than Positive Rights. And They Are Extremely Tricky, Because Now We Are Dealing With Things That Are Zero Sum.

Ann Coulter To Me Is Someone Who Says Things That I Say All The Time, But I Say Them At Three In The Morning When I'm Drunk As A Monkey. She Says Them At Three In The Afternoon Stone Sober In Bright Daylight.

Of Course, The Humans In Haiti Have Hope. They Hope To Leave.

Because Of Their Size, Parents May Be Difficult To Discipline Properly.

The Political Process Consists Entirely Of Politicians Talking Out Of Their Butts.

The Road To Serfdom Was Written During Wwii, And Basically It's An Anti-nazi, Anti-communist Thing, But Also It's An Anti-conservative And Anti-labor-party Thing Aimed At The British. He Was An Austrian, Writing In Britain. And I Feel Like Now, I Guess, Everybody Pays Lip Service To Libertarian - And, Indeed, Many Conservative - Ideas, And Yet They Keep Moving Forward With An Increasingly Bureaucratic State. It Shows Itself In All Sorts Of Little Ways.

Something That Comes To Us, Some Gym Shoe That Comes To Us As A Result Of Child Labor From A Brutal Dictatorship, Where People Do Not Have Basic Freedoms, It Wouldn't Bug Me To Tax The Living Dickens Out Of That Thing Or Even To Forbid Its Importation Whatsoever. But That's A Moral Question, Not An Economic Question.

Good Manners Are A Combination Of Intelligence, Education, Taste And Style Mixed Together So That You Don't Need Any Of Those Things.

You Start Out With Mad Magazine, And You Go Right Through The Sort Of Black Humor Of Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, Mort Sahl, Paul Krassner... If You Put Lenny Together With Mad Magazine And Run It Through The Brain Of A College Student, You Get National Lampoon.

Masochists Are People That Have Pleasure Confused With Pain. In A World That Has Television Confused With Entertainment, Doritoes Confused With Food, And Dan Quayle Confused With A National Political Leader, Masochists Are Clearly Less Mixed-up Than The Rest Of Us.

It Remains To Be Seen Which Program Will Cause Greater Societal Damage: China's One-child Policy Or America's One-parent Policy.

Cats Possess So Many Of The Same Qualities As Some Poeple That It Is Often Hard To Tell The People And The Cats Apart.

Fiscal Conservatism Is Just An Easy Way To Express Something That Is A Bit More Difficult, Which Is That The Size And Scope Of Government, And Really The Size And Scope Of Politics In Our Lives, Has Grown Uncomfortable, Unwieldy, Intrusive And Inefficient.

The Body Is Forever Teaching Us Lessons. There Are All Sorts Of Things That We Can't Do, Shouldn't Do, Had Better Not Do Very Often Or Do For Too Long As We Get Older. The Body Makes Its Presence Known.

I Don't Think I'll Ever Be A Real Boat Reporter. My Rolex Isn't Big Enough.

Now Majority Rule Is A Precious, Sacred Thing Worth Dying For. But Like Other Precious, Sacred Things .... It's Not Only Worth Dying For; It Can Make You Wish You Were Dead. Imagine If All Life Were Determined By Majority Rule. Every Meal Would Be A Pizza.

In Case We Have To Shoot Democrats. It Happened During The Civil War, And It Could Happen Again.

Never Fight An Inanimate Object.

There's Not A Woman In The Book, The Plot Hinges On Unkindness To Animals, And The Black Characters Mostly Drown By Chapter 29.

I Always Thought There Was Some Romance To That '30s Leftist Stuff, Even Though I'm A Republican.

One Thing Talk Can't Accomplish Is Communication. This Is Because Everybody's Talking Too Much To Pay Attention To What Anyone Is Saying

You May Be Surprised To Discover You're Rich, Especially If You're Broke.

Politicians Are Always Interested In People. Not That This Is Always A Virtue. Fleas Are Interested In Dogs.

One Of The Things That Makes Me A Conservative, Or A Libertarian, Or Whatever The Heck It Is That I Am - A Person Who Doesn't Much Like Big Government - Is That I Do Not Like The Concentration Of The Power.

The French Are Sawed-off Sissies Who Eat Snails And Slugs And Cheese That Smells Like People's Feet. Utter Cowards Who Force Their Own Children To Drink Wine, They Gibber Like Baboons Even When You Try To Speak To Them In Their Own Wimpy Language.

I Don't Even Know Which End Of A Computer One Is Supposed To Gaze Into. I've Never Used A Computer.

There Is A Fine Line In The Third World Between Half A Dozen Customs Officials Waiting For You To Offer Them A Bribe And Half A Dozen Customs Officials Waiting For You To Offer Them A Bribe So They Can Throw You In Jail.

There's One More Terrifying Fact About Old People: I'm Going To Be One Soon.

The French Are A Smallish, Monkey-looking Bunch And Not Dressed Any Better, On Average, Than The Citizens Of Baltimore. True, You Can Sit Outside In Paris And Drink Little Cups Of Coffee, But Why This Is More Stylish Than Sitting Inside And Drinking Large Glasses Of Whiskey I Don't Know.

I Couldn't Have Gotten Into Harvard With A Crowbar.

The Forces Of Safety Are Afoot In The Land. I, For One, Believe It Is A Conspiracy - A Conspiracy Of Safety Nazis Shouting "sieg Health" And Seeking To Trammel Freedom, Liberty, And Large Noisy Parties. The Safety Nazis Advocate Gun Control, Vigorous Exercise, And Health Foods. The Result Can Only Be A Disarmed, Exhausted, And Half-starved Population Ready To Acquiesce To Dictatorship Of Some Kind.

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I Have Three Children And Three Dogs. You Put Them In A Prius, You Know? People Who Have A Prius Obviously Have No Life! No Wife, No Kids, No Pets - There's No Room In There For Anything!

A Humorist Doesn't Really Do That Much Note-taking.

No Government Proposal More Complicated Than "this Note Is Legal Tender For All Debts, Public And Private" Ever Works.

Adam Smith's Huge Failure Was The Fact That He Did Not Foresee The Industrial Revolution.

When A Thing Defies Physical Law, There's Usually Politics Involved.

Newsmen Believe That News Is A Tacitly Acknowledged Fourth Branch Of The Federal System. This Is Why Most News About Government Sounds As If It Were Federally Mandated -- Serious, Bulky And Blandly Worthwhile, Like A High-fiber Diet Set In Type.

What About Snipers?" I Once Asked Someone. He Said, "oh, Most Of The Snipers Have Automatic Weapon. They Arent Very Accurate.

The Mystery Of Government Is Not How Washington Works But How To Make It Stop.

If You Are Young And You Drink A Great Deal It Will Spoil Your Health, Slow Your Mind, Make You Fat - In Other Words, Turn You Into An Adult.

Anyone Who Thinks He Has A Better Idea Of What's Good For People Than People Do Is A Swine.

There's Such A Self-conscious Balance That Goes Into Television. Also, These Are Not People That Think Things Through.

I Write Because I Like To Make Things And The Only Things I Am Good At Making Things With Are Words.

[friedrich] Hayek Is Not Protesting That Things Like Child Labor And Stuff Are Good. He's Just Trying To Show That When Government Undertakes To Make Everything Good For Everybody, This Is What Happens. And He Addresses It To Socialists Of All Parties.

This Country Is So Urbanized We Think Low-fat Milk Comes From Cows On Nutri/system Weight-loss Plans.

I Like Making Things. I Have A Wood Shop At Home. I Am A Terrible Carpenter But I Love Doing It.

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Never Wear Anything That Panics The Cat.

Not Being A Liberal, I Have Very Little Grasp Of Things That I Know Nothing About.

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There Are Twenty-seven Specific Complaints Against The British Crown Set Forth In The Declaration Of Independence. To Modern Ears They Still Sound Reasonable. They Still Sound Reasonable, In Large Part, Because So Many Of Them Can Be Leveled Against The Federal Government Of The United States.

Visiting Future World Is Like Opening A Chinese Fortune Cookie To Read, "soon You'll Be Finished With Dinner."

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Nuclear Disarmament

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I'd Like To End The Book A Lot Of Ways. Except I Don't Have Any Answers. Use Your Common Sense. Be Nice. This Is The Best I Can Do. All The Trouble In The World Is Human Trouble. Well, That's Not True. But When Cancer Cells Run Amok And Burst Out Of The Prostate And Take Over The Liver And Lymph Glands And End Up Killing Everything In The Body Including Themselves, They Certainly Are Acting Like Some Humans We Know.

The America's Cup Is Like Driving Your Lamborgini To The Gran Prix Track To Watch The Charter Buses Race.

Men Generally Pay For All Expenses On A Date ... Either Sex, However, May Bring A Little Gift, Its Value To Be Determined By The Bizarrness Of The Sexual Request To Be Made Later That Evening.

Crazy Old People Are Our Entire Source Of Polling Information.

If You're Doing A Column, You Kind Of Have To. Like In The Back Of Sports Illustrated, Rick Reilly Has To Find Something To Be Mad About. It's Not Really The Way I Approach Things.

It Is Very Hard Now To Shock People Into Thinking About Government Regulation And The Extent Of Government Involvement In Life.

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When I Get In Deep Water, I Prefer To Announce That I'm In Over My Head.

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It Was Ronald Reagan Who Used To Say That The 10 Most Frightening Words In The English Language Are, "i'm From The Federal Government, And I'm Here To Help."

Term Limits Aren't Enough. We Need Jail.

Whatever It Is That The Government Does, Sensible Americans Would Prefer That The Government Does It To Somebody Else. This Is The Idea Behind Foreign Policy.

We Also Have A Lot Of The Same Influences - We Both Read A Lot Of The Beatniks. And Yet What We Actually Do Is Almost Exactly The Opposite. His [ Hunter S. Thompson] Political Stuff Is Just Wonderful, But Basically Nothing Happens.

I Read Good. I Was An English Major.

The Idea Of Capitalism Is Not Just Success But Also The Failure That Allows Success To Happen.

Who Does Bill Clinton Think Got Off The Boat And Stepped On Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps Volunteers?

If I Give Up Drinking, Smoking, And Fatty Foods, I Can Add Ten Years To My Life. Trouble Is, I'll Add It To The Wrong End.

Asia Is The Continent Rhythm Forgot. At Best Asian Music Is Off-brand American Pop, Like Sonny Bono In A Karaoke Bar. At Worst Asian Music Sounds As If A Truck Full Of Wind Chimes Collided With A Stack Of Empty Oil Drums During A Birdcall Contest.

There Is Only One Basic Human Right, The Right To Do As You Damn Well Please.

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Political Stuff Is All About His [hunter S. Thompson] Reaction To A Situation. And My Stuff Is Much More Externally Driven.

This Going On And On About How Terrible A Carbon-based Economy Is, These People Are Full Of Crap. They Don't Know What They're Talking About. Their Motives Are Not Necessarily Good Just Because They Say They Are Being Good. It's Peace, Love, And Understanding. To Which I Can Just Say, "shut Up." Human Liberty, Rule Of Law, And Free Markets Fix This Stuff. It Isn't Necessary To Go Around Being The Mia Farrow Of The Ecosphere.

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Think About Last Time You Were Broke ... Now How Well Did It Go With Spending Your Way Out Of It? Did That Work?

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From National Lampoon, You Go Directly To Saturday Night Live, Because It's A Lot Of The Same People.

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Hunter S. Thompson And I Are Old Friends, But What We Do Is So Different. There Are Surface Similarities That Really Have To Do With Us Being Frustrated Poets.

Modern Air Travel Means Less Time Spent In Transit. That Time Is Now Spent In Transit Lounges.

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Always Read Something That Will Make You Look Good If You Die In The Middle Of It.

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This Country Was Founded By Religious Nuts With Guns.

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Making Fun Of Born-again Christians Is Like Hunting Dairy Cows With A High Powered Rifle And Scope.

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Satire Doesn't Effect Change.

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The Collegiate Idealists Who Fill The Ranks Of The Environmental Movement Seem Willing To Do Absolutely Anything To Save The Biosphere, Except Take Science Courses And Learn Something About It.

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Popular Culture

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Walt Is Dead. And, After A Couple Of Hours At Epcot, You'll Wish You Were, Too.

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Government Conspiracy? They Can't Even Deliver Our Mail And It's Got Our Address On It And Everything!

That Happy Sense Of Purpose People Have When Standing Up For A Principle They Haven't Really Been Knocked Down For Yet.

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Every Government Is A Parliament Of Whores. The Trouble Is, In A Democracy, The Whores Are Us.

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It's Better To Make Fun Of Yourself Because You've Always Got Someone Around To Make Fun Of, And They Can't Sue You.

There Are Artists With Palettes And Easels Selling The Kind Of Modern Art That Soviet Art Critics Used To Critique With Bulldozers. Judging By The Paintings I Saw, The Soviets Were Right The First Time.

The Soviet Constitution Guarantees Everyone A Job. A Pretty Scary Idea, I'd Say.

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A Girl Who Is Really Pretty - Whether She Wraps Herself In An Abayah, A Nun's Habit, Or The Front Hall Rug - Never Wraps Herself So That The World Can't Tell.

There's A Current Notion That You Should "take Charge Of Your Disease." No Thanks. I'm Busy. I've Got Cancer. I'm Willing To Face Having Cancer. I'm Not Willing To Face Having Cancer With Homework. I Promised Dr. Pipas And Dr. Zaki That I Wouldn't Show Up With Sheaves Of Printouts From The Internet Containing Everything On Wikipedia On Malignancies. They Each Laughed With Detectable Notes Of Relief. Although I Suspect My Wife Has Made Her Way Into The Health Blog Ether. Fish Oil Pills, Raw Kelp, And Other Untoward Substances Started Showing Up On Dinner Plates After I Was Diagnosed.

The Number Of American Presidential Candidates Varies With The Sunspot Cycle And The Phases Of The Moon. Being A Republican, I'm Backing Hillary Clinton. Because She Could Lose. The Reason Is Not That She's A Woman. The Reason Is That She's The Particular Woman Who Taught The 4th Grade Class That Every Man In America Wished He Were Dead In. Hillary Clinton Is Lucy Holding The Football For Charlie Brown. Hillary Clinton Is "america's Ex-wife."

Ideology, Politics And Journalism, Which Luxuriate In Failure, Are Impotent In The Face Of Hope And Joy.

We Need A Government, Alas, Because Of The Nature Of Humans.

Every Generation Finds The Drug It Needs.

We Are A Nation That Worships Speed And Power. And For Good Reason. Without Power We Would Still Be Part Of England And Everybody Would Be Out Of Work... Bicycles Are Too Slow And Impuissant For A Nation Like Ours. They Belong In Czechoslovakia.

A Fruit Is A Vegetable With Looks And Money. Plus, If You Let Fruit Rot, It Turns Into Wine, Something Brussel Sprouts Never Do.

I Started Reading Hunter S. Thompson When I Was In College.

My Grandmother Wouldn't Even Speak The Word Democrat If There Were Children In The Room, She'd Say Bastards Instead.

The Question Nowadays Is Not What Makes Government Work. The Question Is How Do We Make It Stop.

Government Work

The Tenth Commandment Sends A Message To Socialists, To Egalitarians, To People Obsessed With Fairness, To American Presidential Candidates In The Year 2000 - To Everyone Who Believes That Wealth Should Be Redistributed. And That Message Is Clear And Concise: Go To Hell.

We Had A Choice Between Democrats Who Couldn't Learn From The Past And Republicans Who Couldn't Stop Living In It.

You Know, If Government Were A Product, Selling It Would Be Illegal. ... Government Contains Impure Ingredients - As Anybody Who's Looked At Congress Can Tell You. ... Government Practices Deceptive Advertising. And The Merest Glance At The Federal Budget Is Enough To Convict The Government Of Perjury, Extortion, And Fraud. ... In A Nutshell: Government Should Be Against The Law. Term Limits Aren't Enough. We Need Jail.

All Change Is Bad. But Sometimes It Has To Be Done.

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If The Japanese Want To Be Taken Seriously As World Financial Powers, They'd Better Quit Using The Same Tailor As Variety Show Chimps.

The Lampoon Started In 1970, And I Began Writing Freelance For Them Around The End Of 1971, And Then All Through '72. They Hired Me In '73, And I Left Early In '81. I Did Everything From Low Puns To Being Editor-in-chief.

East Germany Was So Total In Its Totalitarianism That Everything Was Banned Which Wasn't Compulsory.

It Is A Law Of Governance That Democracies Have To Spend Themselves Dizzy. Citizens Of Democracies Can, After All, Tell Their Government To Give Them Things.

Democracies Have

Then There Was Lsd, Which Was Supposed To Make You Think You Could Fly. I Remember It Made You Think You Couldn't Stand Up, And Mostly It Was Right.

Everybody Wants To Save The Earth; Nobody Wants To Help Mom Do The Dishes.

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One Of The Enduring Problems With Certain Societies In The World - And This Is Certainly True Of A Lot Of Places In The Middle East - Is That The Capacity For Self-governance And Self-organizing Just Isn't There. It Has To Do With History.

Worshiping The Earth Is More Fun Than Going To Church. It's Also Closer.

Going To Church

Sloths Move At The Speed Of Congressional Debate But With Greater Deliberation And Less Noise.

If You Say A Modern Celebrity Is An Adulterer, A Pervert And A Drug Addict, All It Means Is That You've Read His Autobiography.

If Government Were A Product, Selling It Would Be Illegal.

Pollution Is A Problem, And There's The Whole Problem Of The Spoiling Of The Commons, But We've Addressed The Pollution Problem On A Variety Of Different Levels In A Variety Of Ways, And It's Worked Pretty Well.

Once We Realized That There Were These 25 Invariable Types - The Class Politician, The Frigid Popular Girl, The Kid Who Tags Along Behind The Jocks - Once We Came Up With These Key Characters In A Cloud Of Marijuana, The Whole Thing Just Came Together. One Of The Things I'm Really Proud Of Is How Much Of A High-school Yearbook It Is In Its Look, So Much So That Hunter Publishing Had The Art Director, David Kaestle, And I Come For Years To Their Annual Convention And Do A Little Talk On How Not To Do A Yearbook.

[al] Franken Is Left-wing And Funny. He's A Pretty Good Political Humorist.

It Had Never Occurred To Us That The Kremlin's New Anti-booze Campaign Would Apply To Journalists. Now, That's A Human-rights Violation.

The Only Really Good Vegetable Is Tabasco Sauce. Put Tabasco Sauce In Everything. Tabasco Sauce Is To Bachelor Cooking What Forgiveness Is To Sin. The Next Best Vegetable Is The Jalapeno Pepper. It Has The Virtue Of Turning Salads Into Practical Jokes.

Zen Martini: A Martini With No Vermouth At All. And No Gin, Either.

Rich White Protestant Men Have Held On To Some Measure Of Power In America Almost Solely By Getting Women, Blacks, And Other Disadvantaged Groups To Wear Crippling Foot Fashions. This Keeps Them Too Busy With Corns And Bunions To Compete In The Job Market.

I'll Pick "i'm Kidding" Anytime Over "i'm Lying."

Never Serve Oysters In A Month That Has No Paycheck In It.

There's No Telling What Might Have Happened To Our Defense Budget If Saddam Hussein Hadn't Invaded Kuwait That August And Set Everyone Gearing Up For World War Ii. Can We Count On Saddam Hussein To Come Along Every Year And Resolve Our Defense-policy Debates? Given The History Of The Middle East, It's Possible.

In The Third World, Honk Your Horn Only Under The Following Circumstances: 1. When Anything Blocks The Road. 2. When Anything Doesn't. 3. When Anything Might. 4. At Red Lights. 5. At Green Lights. 6. At All Other Times.

Any Trade That Is Voluntarily Made Is Mutually Beneficial, By Definition, And, Indeed, Is Balanced, By Definition.

Staying Married May Have Long-term Benefits. You Can Elicit Much More Sympathy From Friends Over A Bad Marriage Than You Ever Can From A Good Divorce.

It Is Easy To Understand Why The Cat Has Eclipsed The Dog As Modern America's Favorite Pet. People Like Pets To Possess The Same Qualities They Do. Cats Are Irresponsible And Recognize No Authority, Yet Are Completely Dependent On Others For Their Material Needs. Cats Cannot Be Made To Do Anything Useful. Cats Are Mean For The Fun Of It. In Fact, Cats Possess So Many Of The Same Qualities As People That It Is Often Hard To Tell The People And The Cats Apart.

There Are Just Two Rules Of Governance In A Free Society: Mind Your Own Business. Keep Your Hands To Yourself.

Mind Your Own Business

[kurt] Vonnegut Once Said, If You Ever Want To Know Who Somebody Is... Like You Look At Richard Nixon, Or Adolf Hitler, Or Ralph Nader, Or Anybody Who Seems Like A Difficult Person To Understand, And Is Therefore Not Part Of The Pattern Of Human Behavior. Think About Who They Were In High School, And They Will Explain Themselves To You. So We Got A Hold Of, Like, 50 High-school Yearbooks, Including My Mom's From 1925 Or Something, And We Discovered That They're All The Same.

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