P. J. O’Rourke Gets Bitten by a Black Swan

P. J. O’Rourke’s political humor frequently causes me to laugh out loud. His humor is funny because there is truth contained within. Until recently, one of my favorite quotes was the following:

“The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take one hundred of its most prominent numbskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.”

This quote has lost much of its humor, at least for me. It has become O’Rourke’s Black Swan. The premise upon which it was based changed in ways that O’Rourke could never have imagined. The Constitution and the Rule of Law have been weakened so much, particularly in the last decade, that they no longer constrain as they once did.

Unfortunately, these “prominent numbskulls” are now unconstrained and doing great damage to the country. The political inmates are now running the institution without the constraints of the original operating system. They have become free-wheeling political entrepreneurs limited only by their imaginations and political infighting as to how much damage they can impose on the citizenry.

Under these conditions, we would be better with these 100 numbskulls in the private sector where competition would constrain and presumably eliminate many of them before they did much harm. I don’t blame you Mr. O’Rourke. Who could have foreseen this blackest of Black Swans?

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