"I believe things that can be proven by reason and by experiment, and, believe you me, I want to see the logic and the lab equipment. I believe that Western civilization, after some disgusting glitches, has become almost civilized. I believe it is our first duty to protect that civilization. I belive it is our second duty to improve it. I believe it is our third duty to extend it if we can."
"Second Thoughts About the Sixties"
"originally a speech given in October 1987 at the Second Thoughts conference in Washington, DC"
and included in Give War a Chance
page 94 (cite info from page x)
Links are mine -- ed.
The 5-Minute Interview: P J O'Rourke
by Elisa Bray
The Independent(London), 11 NOV 2005
In his 1998 book Eat The Rich, humorist and pop sociologist P. J. O'Rourke examines economic systems the world over in an attempt to answer "one fundamental question about economics:
"The individual is the wellspring of conservatism. The purpose of conservative politics is to defend the liberty of theindividual and -- lest individualism run riot -- insist upon individual responsibility. ...
The first question of political science is -- or should be: "What is good for everyone?" .... By observing the progress of mankind, we can see that the things that are good for everyone are the things that have increased the accountability of the individual, the respect for the individual and the power of the individual to master his (sic) own fate. .... There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. (There is no virtue in permitting people to starve, and there is no virtue in standing by when you could have helped.)
.... Individual liberty is lost when government stops asking "What is good for all individuals?" and starts asking "What is good?"
.... the dreadful history of the 20th century is in large part a history of the terrible results of these collectivist endeavors. Once respect for the individual is lost, then what do 100 million dead individuals matter -- especially if their deaths are for the "collective good"?
.... any time the government treats one person differently than another because of the group to which that person belongs -- whether it's a group of rich, special-interest tax dodgers or a group of impoverished, minority job-seekers -- individual equality is lessened and freedom is diminished.
Any time the government gives away goods and services -- even if it gives them away to all people equally -- individual dependence is increased and freedom is diminished. (It happens that people sometimes do find themselves in positions of dependence [arguably most of us if we live long enough, and arguably all but psychopaths to some extent always, but at any rate victims of disasters, health problems, job cuts, etc.], and such need [and "dependence"] does diminish personal freedom. I'd argue that we should make goods and services available to those who need them -- exchanging "freedom from dependence" for "freedom to starve" is not necessarily a good deal, and those who with to refuse assistance should be free to do so.)
Any time the government makes rules about people's behavior when that behavior does not occasion real and provable harm to others -- telling you to buckle your seat belt or forbidding you to publish pornography on the Internet -- respect for the individual is reduced and freedom is diminished. "
Eat The Rich
page 240-242
"Hong Kong is the best contemporary example of laissez-faire. The economic theory of "allow to do" holds that all sorts of doings ought, indeed, to be allowed, and that government should interfere only to keep the peace, ensure legal rights, and protect property. ...
Jesus, it's a rich city. Except where it's Christ-almighty poor. Hong Kong is full of that "poverty midst plenty" stuff beloved of foreign correspondents such as myself....
It's a modern place, deaf to charm, dumb in the language of aesthetics, caught up in a wild, romantic passion for the plain utilitarian. ...
Hong Kong was (and to be fair to its new commie rulers, remains for the moment) socialism's perfect opposite. Hong Kong does not have import or export duties, or restrictions on investments coming in, or limits on profits going out. There is no capital-gains tax, no interest tax, no sales tax, and no tax breaks for muddle-butt companies that can't make it on their own.
The corporate tax in Hong Kong is 16.5 percent of profits. The individual tax rate is 15 percent of gross income. Hong Kong's government runs a permanent budget surplus and consumes only 6.9 percent of gross domestic product (compared with the 20.8 percent of GDP spent just by the federal government in the U.S.) ...
Hong Kong has never had democracy, but its wallet-size liberties, its Rights-of-Man-in-a-purse, have been so important to individualism and self-governance that in 1995 an international group of libertarian think tanks was moved to perhaps overstate the case and claim, 'Hong Kong is the freest nation in the world.'
Free because there's been freedom to screw up, too. Hong Kong has no minimum wage, no unemployment benefits, no union-boosting legislation, no Social Security, no national health program, and hardly enough welfare to keep one U.S trailer park in satellite dishes and Marlboro Lights. Just 1.2 percent of GDP goes in transfers to the helplessly poor or subsidies to the hopelessly profitless.
Living without a safety net, people in Hong Kong have kept a grip on the trapeze. The unemployment rate is below 3 percent. In America, a shooting war is usually needed to get unemployment that low. The "natural rate" of unemployment is considered to be about 5 percent in the U.S., which rate would cause natural death from starvation in Hong Kong. ... Economic growth in Hong Kong has averaged 7.5 percent per year for the past twenty years, causing gross domestic product to quadruple since 1975. With barely one-tenth of 1 percent of the world's population, Hong Kong is the world's eighth-largest international trader and tenth-largest exporter of services. ...
Besides Americans, only the people of Luxembourg and Switzerland are richer than those of Hong Kong. And these are two other places where capital is allowed to move and earn freely. ...
Quite a bit of government effort is required to create a system in which government leaves people alone. Hong Kong's colonial administration provided courts, contract enforcement, laws that applied to everyone, some measure of national defense (although the Red Chinese People's Liberation Army probably could have lazed its way across the border anytime it wanted), an effective police force (Hong Kong's crime rate is lower than Tokyo's), and bureaucracy that was efficient and uncorrupt but not so hideously uncorrupt that it would not turn a blind eye on an occasional palm-greasing illegal refugee or unlicensed street vendor.
The Brits built schools and roads. And the kids went to school because they knew if they did not, they'd have to hit that road. And the U.K gave Hong Kong a stable currency, which it did totally by cheating -- first pegging the Hong Kong currency to the British pound and then, when everyone got done laughing at that, pegging to the U.S dollar at a rate of 7.8:1. ...
Hong Kong was also fortunate in having a colonial government which included some real British heroes, men who helped of these the place stay as good as it was for a s long as it did.
The most heroic of these was John Cowperthwaite, a young colonial officer sent to Hong Kong in 1945 to oversee the colony's economic recovery. ... while he was in charge, he strictly limited bureaucratic interference in the economy growth or the size of GDP. ...
During Cowperthwaite's "nothing doing" tenure, Hong Kong's exports grew by an average of 13.8 percent a year, industrial wages doubled, and the number of households in extreme poverty shrank from more than half to 16 percent."
Nice little summary of some of O'Rourke's views. Gets off to kind of a slow start, but stick with it. (And if I were in O'Rourke's shoes, I would have paid to have that introduction cut.)
I think we can summarize his position as: "Power corrupts. Government is power."
And we should probably note that the GOP of today is not the same as the GOP of 1995 characterized here.
"... proposing to close the "wealth gap" is worse than silly. It entails a lie. The notion of economic equality is based on an ancient and ugly falsehood central to bad economic thinking: There's a fixed amount of wealth. Wealth is zero-sum. If I have too many cups of tea, you have to lick the tea pot. But wealth is based on productivity. Productivity is expandable. Otherwise there wouldn't be any economic thinking, good or bad, or any tea or tea pots either."
No contest!! Unquestionably, it's better for people to fish for themselves than beg from others. But the problem I have with the attitude of O'Rourke and other individualists is that, when we're confronted by a starving person and we have fish to spare, I think it's inumbent upon us to share rather than to say, "Hey, I think you should go fish for yourself."
I also have to bring up issues of monopolization and coercion. If I fill the whole river with my own fleet of boats, and guys with guns to chase off competitors, it's no good telling the starving that it's their own fault.
Although, as O'Rourke says, some resources are expandable (we can plant more land in tea), and alternatives are available):(1) Nothing is infinitely expandable (The Earth / Solar System / Universe is only so big.)
(2) The costs rapidly run up against the law of diminishing returns (All the good tea-growing land is currently planted in tea. If we decide to irrigate the Sahara to make more land for tea, we are operating in the land of economic fantasy.)
(3) At any given instant any resource is finite: The customers at an auction compete with each other to obtain a Ming vase or a van Gogh or a scrap of paper bearing scribbles by James Joyce, even though it's perfectly obvious that other vases, other paintings, and other scribbled scraps of paper can be easily produced. Shipwreck survivors may come to blows over food, even though theoretically tons of food may be made available to them in the future. Oil-thirsty nations bomb and invade in attempts to insure their supply, even though their economies may steer away from oil dependence in the future.
"According to David S. Landes, professor emeritus of both economics and history at Harvard, just 250 years ago the average standard of living in the wealthiest nation on Earth, Great Britain, was only about five times higher than in the poorest nation. Today, the ratio between, say, Switzerland and Mozambique is something like 400 to one. What happened? ....
... he finds that the 18th Century Scottish Enlightenment, exemplified by Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, outlined a more accurate checklist for predicting what makes winners: "markets, markets, markets;" the security of private property; patriotism in defense of the homeland; careers open to talents; trust extending beyond the family; rationalism, skepticism, and argument; curiosity about other cultures; and an intense work ethic, to name a few."
-- Compare with the / New Meme / concepts from David Brin!
"The negative rights are the rights to freedom of speech, the right to -- I mean, all the rights that Martin Luther King fought for were negative rights. The -- negative rights are essentially those rights that are not zero sum, the right to freedom. Your right to freedom of speech doesn't impinge upon anybody else's right to freedom of speech unless you yell louder.- A page on this site on / Human Rights and Civil Rights /
Positive rights, the bad rights are the "give me" rights, are the ri -- I have a right to a certain level of income, I have a right to housing, I have a right to medical care, I have a right to education. Those things deeply offend conservatives and the fact that many of these rights group went quickly from struggling for negative rights to the "gimme", you know, just give me a bunch of stuff ..."
"... when it comes to making money, humanity may now be further from equality of results than ever before. According to David S. Landes, professor emeritus of both economics and history at Harvard, just 250 years ago the average standard of living in the wealthiest nation on Earth, Great Britain, was only about five times higher than in the poorest nation. Today, the ratio between, say, Switzerland and Mozambique is something like 400 to one. What happened? ...
Landes denounces mainstream academia's dogma of absolute cultural relativism as "an attack on knowledge," because "distinctions are the stuff of understanding." Instead, he finds that the 18th Century Scottish Enlightenment, exemplified by Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, outlined a more accurate checklist for predicting what makes winners: "markets, markets, markets;" the security of private property; patriotism in defense of the homeland; careers open to talents; trust extending beyond the family; rationalism, skepticism, and argument; curiosity about other cultures; and an intense work ethic, to name a few."
"... here are the traditional values of capitalism as seen by those who regard it as noble"
"Work, enterprise and thrift makes people better off; voting for being made better off is usually self-defeating.
Normally constituted individuals do not deliberately seek to get poorer. The vast majority strive to get richer. For the economist and perhaps for the moralist, too, one undying virtue of democracy is that it lets them strive without brute prohibition, even if, like the beekeeper who lets his bees gather the honey though it does not let them eat it all, it does interfere with the free disposition of the fruits of human striving. Dictatorships are often try, sometimes successfully, to force people to give up striving for prosperity and devote all their efforts to some more or less insane goal they fix for them. Democracy is at least innocent of this sin.
Most economists ascribe further virtues to democracy that positively help people get richer. Such virtues are credited with giving society the rule of law, education, health and (other) public gods. Each of these boons is contestable and needs a closer look. ...
Voters do themselves probably the worst possible service when they try to use the mechanisms of democracy to obtain by politics what the economy is denying them. Car owners hurt by high gasoline prices will then demand an "energy policy," sugar beet farmers an import tariff on cane sugar (euphemistically called a "trade policy"), assorted business interests tired of sundry taxes demand a "positive fiscal policy," farmers blockade roads with their tractors to defend "national self-sufficiency in food," small shopkeepers demand that supermarkets be refused building permits in the name of a "policy of proximity," the labor unions threaten to strike if there is no "meaningful policy of employment," regions ill served with roads urge a "balanced transport policy," and all who have pet schemes in mind call for a "policy of purposeful public investment." As some of these demands are met, the unmet ones are urged with ever greater stridency."