1971 . I think that a martian left would would be the easiest way to sum it up. I was a leftwinger but i didnt make enough sense to actually be a communist or anything like that. When did the transformation occur . Well, it was gradual. It took place over in fact, i just wrote about it. Theres a book coming out from the Hoover Institution is backing this, why i turned right and its the story of a bunch of us and why we became right. It actually is a long story and i wont tell it. Ly give the short version. I was a radical leftist, very much in favor of some sort of marxist socialist thing in america. I got a job. I got a job paying 150 a week. I was a messenger in new york. 150 was a lot of money as far as i was concerned. I was living in the lowers east side and i was broke. We got paid every two weeks. I was looking forward to that 300 bucks and so was my landlord, i might say and my drug dealer and a number of other people. And i got my first paycheck and i netted out at 178 or Something Like that. Was supposed to be 300 bucks but after federal taxes, state tax, city tax, social security, Retirement Fund which i really cared about in those days, wait a minute, wait a minute. Ive been advocating socialist, marxism, communism for years, screaming and yelling in the streets and we already have it, they just took half my pay, whats going on here . Im not rockfeller. We have socialism, thats why i start today snap out of it. Took a while. Somebody else who made a switch in their politics was christopher hitchins. Much more recently. Right, back in 1993 this is what he had to say about you. 60s, dropout, permanently stoned and dumbed out and paranoid in the 60s and republican and cashing in this chip ever since and has terrific following as humorist its called Republican Party reptile and the next one, is called holidays in hell and more recent give war a chance. Much better than my books ever had. Here is my revenge upon him. I met him, sure. Ive reckoned that he was running on this joke, i know i know ive been there, ive been in the radical and now i see how wonderful it would be to be a completely buttoned up, buttoned down toy and the basically depends on political correctness, okay, so people try not the make jokes aid, pj would make funny about aids and not fun to make fun of cripples, he would make fun of cripples, its funny, but not funny enough. Christopher, christopher getting away with murder. I might get away with slander, verbal assault. I dont think ive even gotten away with just a little guy, ive never gotten away with physical assault. I think he overstates the case. And also, of course, im long past the point where i can claim to be im republican buttoned down or not. Im an old republican. Now im like most middleage white guys. We are all republicans if if we sometimes call ourselves Something Else like democrat. You didnt know this over here and get attacked, did you . [laughter] pj orourke, all the trouble in the world, modern manners, etiquette book for rude people. 1982. Eat the rich, with whats was this about . Identity the rich is what got me started what being adam smith. I didnt understand why some countries are rich and other countries are poor and i started poking around and going to rich countries and poor countries and figuring why this country was rich and others were poor. It was from that experience, toby mandi editor in england, came up with the idea of series of books, books that changed the world, my book on adam smith and Christopher Hitchens has one on thomas payne and very good it is. It was adam smith, poking around adam smith that toby asked me to write on adam smith. Youre on with pj orourke, go ahead . Are you with us . Hello, come in. New jersey, go ahead. Yeah, i am not sure why mr. Orourke deserves to be taken seriously or given all of this time on your show when a man who i suspect never wore the uniform and i suspect from hearing about his politics in the vietnam era would have done his darnest to avoid the uniform can be slip about war which we would not not had and i happened to be a republican for 20 years voting 3 times for Richard Nixon and twice for ronald reagan, thousands of americans have been killed, tens if not hundreds of thousands of iraqis have been killed, no useful purpose is served by this war and i think its infathommable about making fun of wars. Does mr. Orourke have conception why we have minimum wage laws and maximum hour laws, does he remember the condition before we had the laws and the way laborerrist were obliged to work 12hour days, 6day weeks. Is that what he thinks that one one odd republican. It was on the democratic line actually. Im glad he came in on a democratic line. In your dedication to give war a chance, here is what you write. Like many men of my generation i had an opportunity to give war a chance and i chickened out. I went to my draft physical with a doctors letter about history of drug abuse. The letter was 4 and a half pages long with 3 and a half pages devoted to listing the drugs id abused. I was shoved into psychiatrist and pounding his desk and shouting youre fed up, you dont long on the army. I didnt have to go, but that, of course, meant somebody else had to go in my place. I would like to dedicate this book to him. I hope you got back in one piece fellow. I hope that you were more use to platoon mates than i would have been. I hope that was you. I got a couple of nice letters because of the dedication from people who thought maybe they had punched me in the case and so they appreciated. To begin with the beginning of what the fellow on the phone said. Ive never asked me to take anybody seriously. As to making fun of war, lets put it this way, a bad situation and war is a really rotten situation, like a bad disease, like death itself isnt changed by whether you make fun of it or you dont. We make fun of things not because we approve of them or love them, not because theyre cuddly and cute, we make fun things in order to cope with our own terriblor, or own unease, our unexistential horror, anger at god and disappoint at ourselves, disappointment and so forth. Humor is a mechanism, you can drink and make a joke, you can take drugs and you can you can make yourself all pump on pias and you can do all of those things at once. So why do i make money of war or dont make fun of war is unfortunately not going make war better and nor is it going to make war worse. As to free market and minimum wage and people working in cold mines and working 49 hours a day, 9 days a week and so on and so forth, to its interesting when you say youre in favor of free market you immediately get that response from lots of people, its not, of course at all what adam smith meant. What adam smith was talking about was keeping coerce out of life and marketplaces and its only one aspect of keeping coercion out of life. Adam smiths, the wealthy nations, the essays that he wrote, very important book that no one reads, theory of moral sentiments which is about morality, was all about making people rely upon persuasion and to give up force. Thats the core of morality. Its the core of a free society. Its the core of democracy even though adam smith didnt know that, he lived in a predemocratic era. He didnt quite understand how democracy could work, but he did understand that freedom could work. He was a moral and a practical and and just a plain sort of sympathetic advocate of freedom and at the root of freedom is persuasion. The idea that you want free markets, does not mean that you want markets ruled by force, it does not mean that you want markets ruled by anarchy. It implies a rule of law and implies that we are all equal before that law. It is not prescriptive and doesnt tell us exactly how to conduct the free market. It doesnt give us exact rules. It tells us that there should be rules and we should obey the rules but doesnt say quite exactly what the rules are. In book 5 of the wealth of nations adam smith actually tries to lay down some rules. He tries to take theories and make them prescriptive, actually give us political policy, becomes the policy wonk and 5 books in wealth of nations, when adam smith turns into a policy wonk he becomes as foolish as the rest of us when we become policy wonks. Like they had in the white house and like theyll have in the congress, so to the very angry caller, i would like to say this for a second. No idea why 3 hours should be wasted on me and im not going to claim theres a good idea. You know, because you have certain ideas about how freedom should be conducted and you may well be right and i respect those ideas and those ideas are worth arguing, it may not be the same ideas as i have but dont just because you want to limit certain freedoms in the market, you may be wise or correct freedom but dont be smug about limiting freedom. Everyone who wants to limit freedom, human slavery to taliban to people who are in favor of minimum wage laws, everybody is smug about their desire to to limit human freedoms. Some human freedoms really do need to be limited but that doesnt make you a good person for recognizing that, make you a wise person or sensible person assuming your arguments are good but youre not a good person, you deserve smugness and you dont deserve to vent your angen foolish humorous just because you have some desire to limit, so there. [laughter] pj orourke has appeared on book tv close to 20 times in the past years. Up next tribute to american automobile in book driving like crazy. Its been a great run since they built the First American automobile in springfield, massachusetts. And if the motor weighon company had ban success, springfield, massachusetts, might be todays motor city full of abandoned houses, unemployment, drug dealing, Violent Crime and racial tensions, which as it so happens springfield, massachusetts, is full of anyway. But we owe the american car a lot more than the entertaining spectacle of detroits various felon mayors. Many people my age, we owe our very existence to the car, or to the cars back seat. Where if you check our parents wedding anniversary with our birth date and find them a little too close for comfort, thats where we were conceived. There was no premarital sex in america before the invention of the internal combustion engine. Its true. You couldnt sneak a girl into the rec room of your farm house because your mom and dad, they didnt have a car so couldnt commute so they were stuck home all day working on the farm. And your farmhouse didnt have a rec room because recreation had not been discovered due to all the farm work. On the odd saturday night you could table a girl nut in a bugout marred to get her into the mood to bust poo their coreset because you were haying the hindened of a horse. The car let us out of the barn and while the car was at it, the car destroyed the American Nuclear family and anyone who has had an American Nuclear family can tell you that was a relief to all concerned. And cars caused america to be paved. Not much worse you can do to a country than pave it. I wondered, we never hear a thank you, never hear a word of thanks for getting america paved from to the candidates in a bodycasts who skateboard all the time. Not a word of thanks. Cars provided america with an enviable standard of live. Could not get a job with benefits working on the general Livestock CorporationAssembly Line puttingedders eders on cows and the american car was pa source of intellectual stimulation, because you can think of innovation, the invention, the sheer genius that transformed the 1908 modelt ford into the 1968 shelby cobra gt500. In the course of one single human lifetime full of speeding tickets. Compare this to the progress in the previous mode of mode of transportation. Horse production, horse designed, unchanged for thousands of years. And when it comes to creativity with the horse issue did a Little Research on this. Nobody thought to put a stirrup, to hang a stirrup from a saddle until 500a. D. The stirrup. People headline rising horses for 500 years and took them until 500a. T. Where were they putting their feet . If unable design and engineering hat proceeded at the same pace as horse design and engineering, we would be powering ourselves down the road by running with both of the feet stuck the the hole in the floor like fred flynnston but might come to that with the 010 obama mobile. Most important or all was the cars filled e fulfilled the ideals of americas founding fathers. Of all the truths we hold to be selfevident, of all of the unalienable rights with which we are endowed, which one is most important to the American Dream . It is right there, front and center, flat in the name of the declaration of independence, freedom to leave. Freedom to get out of town. Freedom to get the hell another of here. King george can i have the keys and thats what the declaration of independence says. I got to tell you, the saga of the american car is not an abstract matter to me. This is no subject of fanciful theories. Nancy pelosi may shock she was transported home from the Maternity Ward on pink fluffy clouds supported by foam. Low carbon. But i know it was the car that got me to where i am. My grandfather, jacob orourke, he was born in 1877. Born on a farm about the size of this podium here. In lime city, ohio, which was not a city, and didnt even have any lime. He was one of ten kids. They grew in a oneroom unpainted shack. Have a photograph if, stairing at the photographer amazed to see someone in shoes mitchell greatgrandfather, barney, was a wood cutter in the midwest where there are no trees. Unemployed quite a lot. Also, drunk, also illiterate. Ive got a coup of his marriage certificate with barneys x right there. Barneys only accomplishment aside from the ten prizes he won on the corn shuck stuffing of the poor mans roulette wheel, the only thing he ever accomplished was he trained a pair of old nags to haul him home, dead drunk. He would fool out of the tavern, pass out in the wagon and the horses would bring him home. He accomplished that. Grandpa jake left home, armed with a fifth grade education, heading for the bright lights of to lead dough, ohio, and he went to work as a buggy mechanic. And then one day, a horseless buggy pulled up at the shop, and grandpa saw that and saw the future. He fixed that, too. And it didnt take grandpa long to realize that cleaner hand were to be chad more money to be made selling the things rather than repairing them, and also my uncle archs birth date and grandma and grandpas wedding anniversary were a little too close for comfort. So anyway, he got in the car business, got in the car business and by the time i came along in the 1940s, we had orourke buick, and grandpa and my uncle arch owned the dealership and my dad was a salesman and my brother joe ran the used car lot and my baby brother, and all the aunts auntd girl cousins worked in the office and the boy cousins and me worked on the car lot, creeping and waxing cars and archs so many would run the Car Dealers Association and i went on to do whatever it is i do in this book, writing about cars and stuff. Even in these dark days for the american automobile time it wished id stayed in toledo and taken over the buick agency. Just to be on the late night local tv car dealership ads. I wanted to pirate pats Treasure Island buick, and come out with a parrot on me shoulder and an eye patch, mate questions, come down where prices walk the plank. Free chocolate da balloons for the kiddies. Dad died with honors with free lionses lionses and moose e mitchell my family without the car we couldnt read. Wouldnt have food and stuff. Our history begins with the beginning of the american car. And by now some orourkes have some of us have even gone to college. We didnt go far in college, didnt do very well but we went. So, i take the demise of the american car. I take this personally. Im looking around for somebody to blame. Im mad. Want to blame somebody like ralph nader. Sun and i think we should definitely attack even though ralph is 75 and clearly insane. It took more than one man and his ignorant and ill written book, unsearch at any speed to wreck the most important industry in the nation, and that was the corvair that ralph was attacking and he was ongoing but the corvair, my high school girlfriendded a corvair and he was one of the worst drives and one of the fastest and if she couldnt get herself killed in the corvair it couldnt be done. Ralph was wrong. The pun dents are telling us theres plenty 0 blame to go round for the death of the american car and im not sure about that either. Now, its true that the car executives are knuckleheads but all executives are knuckleheads. Look at bill gates. If you were word a god zillion dollars wouldnt you go to a Barber College and get a decent five dollar haircut. Labor Union Leadership is maddening but one thing to be mad at the Labor Union Leaders and another thing to expect those labor union leaderred to be down the uaw hall standing on a chair yelling, we demand less money from in the bosses. That was just not going to happen. Car workers make 600 an hour, or so im told. And but they get laid off every time a camel fares at an opec meeting. Man their pay is too high but theyre not getting that pay. I think to understand what doomed the american automobile, we have to give up on economics and we have to turn to melodrama. Politicians, journalists, financial analysts, the per per varies of the banal have been looking at car as if a con veryible were a business. Fire the mbas and hire a photo. The fate of detroit is not a result of corporate greed, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprint in the carbon. Its a tragic romance. Its a tragic romance. Up leashed passions, titanic classes, loves lost love and wild horses especially wild horses. We opened up the archives to look at awe their program width p. J. Orourke. The author of 19 books in 2010 he appeared at the Cato Institute in washington, dc where he is also a senior fellow, to offer hi thoughts on politicians and the federal government. I will not be satisfied until every seat in the house and senate is filled by a regular person, a regular person who quite reasonably hates being there. I want government to be like jury duty. And not jury duty for some exciting crime, like the oj simpson murder. I want government to be like jury duty for a long, boring, complex, confusing, trial, concerning tax law. In fact let me suggest indicting our federal tax code just for starts. Which is nothing but fraud. I want government to be du