Mix liberty with humor: writer P.J. O’Rourke’s legacy

P.J. O’Rourke, the great satirist and journalist who championed liberty with humor, died on Tuesday at the age of 74.

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

Over the course of his life, O’Rourke was a prolific writer, penning over 20 books and writing for publications ranging from The Atlantic Monthly to Vanity Fair to The Weekly Standard.

Unlike many libertarians, O’Rourke’s method of championing the seemingly radical notion of individual liberty didn’t rely on tedious economic explanations, but on sharp quips and humorous explanations of the state of things.

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

For example:

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

• “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”

•“If you think health care is expensive now, just wait ‘til it’s free.”

It was through cutting lines like this that O’Rourke skewered and demystified politicians, the game of politics and institutions of government in a way that got people to reflect on how much trust they ought to put in such people and systems.

In his 1991 book “Parliament of Whores,” O’Rourke laments the intrusive nature of government, noting that, among many other things, “It checks the amount of tropical oils in our snack foods, tells us what kind of gasoline we can buy for our cars and how fast we can drive them, bosses us around about retirement, education and what’s on TV ... dictates what we can sniff, smoke and swallow and waylays young men, ships them to distant places and tells them to shoot people they don’t even know.”

Yet, for all that intrusion, O’Rourke notes, “the real problem is that government is boring. We could cure or mitigate the other ills Washington visits on us if we could only bring ourselves to pay attention to Washington itself. But we cannot.”

O’Rourke’s libertarian solution was simple: get the government out of doing so much. But that’s not easy to do when the only people willing to do anything tend to just want government to do more, for them. And so, government continues to grow.

“Government is so tedious that sometimes you wonder if the government isn’t being boring on purpose,” he pondered.

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

Of course, as any principled libertarian would be, O’Rourke was skeptical of both major political parties. “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it,” he wrote.

Those looking for salvation in politics, or specifically from either major political party, are lost on a fool’s errand. People should be free to live their lives with minimal intrusion, including intrusion from the lunacy of politics. Those are the lessons of P.J. O’Rourke. May we never forget him.

O’Rourke skewered and demystified politicians, the game of politics and institutions of government in a way that got people to reflect on how much trust they ought to put in such people and systems.