P. J. O'Rourke
P. J. O'Rourke
Patrick Jake "P. J." O'Rourkeis an American political satirist and journalist. O'Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio's game show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!. Since 2011 O'Rourke has been a columnist at The Daily Beast. In the United Kingdom, he is known as the face of a long-running series of television...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth14 November 1947
CountryUnited States of America
Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.
Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.
A careful reading of 50 Simple Things leaves you wondering whether you're going to die from environmental disaster or intellectual annoyance. Failing either, you can worry yourself to death.
Human problems are complex. If something isn't complex it doesn't qualify as problematic. Very simple bad things are not worth troubling ourselves about.
How a peaceful, uncrowded place with ample wherewithal stays poor is hard to explain. How a conflict-ridden, grossly over-populated place with no resources whatsoever gets rich is simple. The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.
As a libertarian I believe we should have a federal government simple and circumscribed enough to be run by an average, dull, normal American. With George W. Bush we have half the equation in place.
In Hong Kong there is agglomeration beyond my fondest imaginings. The Kowloon district claims a population density four times that of New York City.
In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of 'I hate strangers and anything that's different.'
I'm not a tech-savvy parent. I communicate with my children via the old-media format called yelling.
I knew Hunter Thompson since the '70s, and I loved him, but he would wear me out as I got older.
I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser. On his TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block... pretty funny.
I just wasn't cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm more of an Irish Setter Dad.
The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin.
The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.