Book Review: Eat the Rich

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Eat the Rich

Author: P.J. O'Rourke

Author's web site: http://www.pjorourke.com/

Date: 1998

Publisher: Grove Atlantic

ISBN: 0-87113-719-4

Length: 246 pages

Quote: "Rule of law is crucial. And it has to be good law."

That's one of the conclusions P.J. O'Rourke drew, in this book, after seven more fact-finding overseas tours confirmed what he'd been observing for twenty years. This time, rather than reporting on Major World News Events or on specific car brands, he's observing countries that have different kinds of economic systems.

From the table of contents: "2. GOOD CAPITALISM: Wall Street. 3. BAD CAPITALISM: Albania. 4. GOOD SOCIALISM: Sweden. 5. BAD  SOCIALISM: Cuba...7. HOW (OR HOW NOT) TO REFORM (MAYBE) AN ECONOMY (IF THERE IS ONE): Russia. 8. HOW TO MAKE NOTHING FROM EVERYTHING: Tanzania. 9. HOW TO MAKE EVERYTHING FROM NOTHING: Hong Kong. 10. HOW TO HAVE THE WORST OF BOTH WORLDS: Shanghai."

P.J. O'Rourke is very well aware that his observations are travellers' tales--although they're good, funny travellers' tales--not scientific studies of economic patterns. That's what his colleagues at the Cato Institute do. Cato cranks out a few dozen economic reports a month, and Americans in search of serious economic data are invited--by O'Rourke in the acknowledgments section, and again here--to subscribe to Cato's e-newsletter. There's no charge at all for more economic studies than most people could possibly want to read or download. Like most subscribers I download, cite, and print one now and then and store the rest "in the cloud" as e-mails. For writers these data are extremely valuable, and, of course, if and when you have money, there are links you can use to feed the economic researchers. Unlike the payment you should be making at least monthly to your favorite bloggers, payments to Cato are tax-deductible.

O'Rourke is, however, a humorist, and like his other books this one is not recommended for reading in any situation where laughing out loud would be inappropriate, because you might.

"[M]y longtime and long-suffering agent...barely winced when I proposed a book on economics ("Oh, Hollywood is going to leap on that")."

"[A] lot of men...are, so to speak, in financial topless bars, sticking millions of dollars into the G-strings of lap-dancing debts and equities."

"As we talked, a young Cuban woman came out on the terrace...and began avidly appreciating the city skyline. 'I'd buy it if she were a tourist,' whispered the [European] reporter [who had spent more time in Cuba], 'but Cubans do not go to dollar bars for the view.'"

"The reliance on muscle means that criminals have a cut of everything mercantile or financial happening in Russia. this, combined with endless political wire-pulling and universal bureaucratic jobbery and graft, leads to an atmosphere that is...still a lot more fun than a KGB torture cell." (In this quote the ellipsis is O'Rourke's.)

"The International Cashew and Coconut Conference was being hosted February 19-21. You'd be nuts not to sign up. and you have to love a city with a thoroughfare name [like] Bibi Titi Mohamed Street."

People become partial to foreign countries for all kinds of reasons that they may or may not fully understand themselves. In this book O'Rourke definitely shows a partiality to Tanzania, perhaps partly because a fellow visitor reports that when about $20 was picked out of his pocket people chased down the thief and brought the wad of local currency back for the visitor to count. You have to respect a city where that could still happen, too. Compare and contrast what is almost guaranteed to happen if you walk around with $20 hanging out of a pocket on a U.S. shopping mall.

O'Rourke has fun, in his Irish-alcoholic fashion, in Russia too. For those of us who grew up during the Cold War I doubt that Russia will ever seem like just another foreign country like Sweden or Tanzania. Hostility is still embedded in some of our brains; a compensatory hope that "the Russians are our friends" (and can be kept that way) comes naturally to some of us. What's embedded in O'Rourke's brain, wherever he goes, is snarkiness.

"Many human rights had been taken from the citizens of the Old Soviet Union, and the first human right they got back seemed to be the right to Outdoor Advertising."

"At least now there's something to do while you're waiting to cross the street. You can have dinner. Moscow is engorged with good places to eat...French...California... Italian...Then there was the Starlite Diner...even the water was imported from the States...I said...'Where's a Russian restaurant?' 'There aren't any'...And there aren't any Russian products in the stores, either, other than vodka, fish eggs,and a few tourist tchotchkes. There is a simple reason for this. The Russian stuff is no good."

"I gave up and took a boat trip to a palace complex...four or five residences too big to live in, plus one too big to walk through without taking a break for lunch."

For a web site that admittedly knows nothing and has little to say about Eastern Europe, this web site has always had a high percentage of Russian readers. I don't get a lot of feedback from them; even official headline news still tends to arrive slowly. I have, however, read that some Russians are coming to understand the word "libertarianism" as a bad thing, meaning the philosophy behind "criminals having a cut of everything." I'd like to call their attention particularly to this book.

I think foreigners are confusing three terms that Americans understand to refer, properly, to three different things:

1. The Libertarian Party is a legitimate, but small, political organization that appeals mostly to the very young and is best known for supporting legalization or at least decriminalization of recreational drugs. Capital-L Libertarians are identified with that specific group. (O'Rourke is a Libertarian.) 

2. Small-l libertarian ideas are not identified with a specific group. Individuals can take a libertarian position on one question and not on others. This web site is generally libertarian, although none of its active members is or has ever been a Libertarian. The libertarian philosophy is that governments should enforce laws only when violations of the laws produce "complaining victims." This doesn't mean that young people can freely indulge in drugs, sex, pollution, financial exploitation, or even tax evasion--indulgence in any of those things can indeed produce "complaining victims," although existing laws may need to be reconsidered in that light. Libertarians believe that civilization depends on "the rule of law" and that it's easier for people to obey the law when the law is kept simple and rational. A traditional explanation of libertarian philosophy is "Your right to swing your arms extends to the point at which someone else's nose begins."

3. The opposite of the rule of law is the rule of force ("reliance on muscle," above), also known as "the criminal mentality" or "the law of the jungle" or "anarchy" or "unbridled selfishness." People may do whatever they can do, which generally means that stronger individuals abuse and exploit weaker ones. The fact that somebody can extort or steal something is accepted as proof that he deserves to own it. No viable political party would ever claim this as its underlying philosophy. All the existing parties accuse one another of allowing it to become an underlying philosophy.

Though American libertarian writing often calls attention to the flaws in proposed or existing law, libertarians are not anarchists. In fact small-l libertarian writing about law, and even O'Rourke's capital-L Libertarian writing about law in this book, expresses a love of law. Our country is, when wrong, to be put right, but older, soberer, small-l libertarians want to put the country right in a proper and orderly fashion. We want to be free from theft and violence, not for those things.

Humans are fallible. One of the sillier mistakes humans tend to make is imagining that we are, or could become, wise or good enough to make better decisions for others than they could make for themselves. We fantasize that if people have wealth or happiness given to them, they might grow up with the benefit of the insights and character development that people acquire by getting wealth or happiness for themselves. We observe from human history that this does not happen. We observe that people are most likely to enjoy wealth and/or happiness when they are free to define wealth and happiness in their own way, and pursue them in their own way, without being oppressed by others or oppressing others. People can be quite content to follow leaders who say "Do what I tell you in exchange for what I offer you"; people are not and should not be content to be pushed around by bullies who say "Do what I tell you or I shall hurt you."

Although words related to "anarchy" have been used in different ways in different languages, and some people (notably the author Ursula K. LeGuin) have argued that "anarchy" could be understood to mean the libertarian ideal of minimal government, in U.S. history people publicly identified as anarchists have been people who rebelled against government in violent, futile ways. The word "libertarian" was coined for the specific purpose of denouncing violent rebellion while supporting more individual freedom. Libertarians know that a demented murderer like Charles Guiteau is even worse than an unsatisfactory leader like James Garfield.

P.J. O'Rourke belongs to a generation that was encouraged, by our sentimental parents and the advertisers trying to sell things to them, to idealize youth-as-such; he's successfully "branded" his writing as reflecting the feelings of rebellious adolescents. He reminisces, more in some of his other books than in this one, about his years of defying his parents' and their generation's "wisdom," living and working with other youth-in-revolt, spending money foolishly, experimenting with dangerous drugs "for fun," driving fast in inefficient cars...O'Rourke was actually paid to write mostly-true stories about driving fast in inefficient cars. And he and most of his friends survived, although as our generation age and develop "the faces we deserve," each year O'Rourke's face makes one think "I don't want to grow old like that." In youth he claims to have enjoyed "making his parents cry" by doing lots of things that increase the probability that those who do them won't grow old at all. Nevertheless, by surviving, O'Rourke learned that our parents' generation had been right about some things, and on pages 233-234 of this book he spells out:

"[T]he prosaic, depressing,and somewhat shameful fact is that the secret to getting ahead is just what my parents told me it was...Hard work. Education. Responsibility. Property rights. Rule of law. Democratic government. Actually...I've never heard of a parent saying, 'Listen here, if I catch you running around without property rights again, I'll take away your cell phone.' But when our parents said, 'Be honest,' they were assuming that property rights were real. And when our parents said, 'Obey the law,' they were making a logical inference that the law existed and that it merited obeying."

This year's e-mail has brought me many opinions about Russia, most of them from Americans who, like me, know very little about Russia except that we grew up during a "Cold War" whose purpose was to evaluate the merits of different types of government, a war we knew we were "winning" because we ended up sending food to the "enemy." This web site has no foreign policy. The writer known as Priscilla King was brought up to smile sardonically at rhetoric about how entire nations "are our friends" or "are our enemies." Official policy may ally or oppose whole nations; individual humans are self-serving and should, where possible, be dealt with in ways that make it as easy and/or profitable as possible for them to behave like potential friends, to reduce the intensity of opposition and the risk of war. However, this web site has been concerned about the claim that "Russians," which Russians or how many Russians the writer didn't know either, "see libertarianism as a threat."

Libertarianism is a threat to the lifestyle some Russians are reportedly trying to support by bullying and exploiting other Russians. Libertarianism does say to women everywhere, "You don't need to sell yourself to one male rape-terrorist to be 'protected' from other rape-terrorists. When women take a levelheaded look at human anatomy, it's easy for even men to understand that anyone who thinks the most sensitive, vulnerable part of his anatomy can be used to intimidate anyone else is insane." Libertarianism also says to small business owners, and to people with disabilities and to smaller children everywhere, "You don't need to 'share your profits' with thieves who contribute nothing to your business, just to avoid having your property stolen or destroyed. Contributing a small amount to a community fund that pays fair wages to honest policemen should provide all the 'protection' your business needs. Anyone who thinks he's entitled to beat you up and steal your money, because he's bigger than you, is insane." And libertarianism says to citizens everywhere, "However bad your economy may be, and however shrewd and clever your leaders may be, you don't need to set your leaders up as dictators. Believing that dictatorship leads to prosperity, in the light of historical evidence, is insane. But violence is not the answer."

Libertarianism is not a threat to Russia, or to individual Russians, at all. Libertarians are not imperialists. We believe in trade. Some of us think big, inefficient, international trading is sustainably profitable. I'm not convinced. When I envision a world where people learn from what works and governments evolve in the direction of libertarianism, I envision more interest in local communities becoming more self-sufficient, an overall reduction in international trade. For libertarianism as such, the concern is that trade be fair and free. If a certain Russian leader had succeeded in "burying" our economy in fair, honest competition, he would have been quite right to do that, and U.S. libertarians would have had something to learn. Since we won the Cold War, Russia has something to learn from U.S. libertarians.

However, one advantage to a Cold War is that it leaves no blood feuds. Libertarianism is nonviolent, non-aggressive, not even evangelical. People who like the results of what they are doing are still fallible. Other people who make other choices undoubtedly have their reasons to like the results of what they are doing. Libertarianism  is not the philosophy that says "Oh those poor foreign people, having to speak their foreign language and eat their foreign food...we must teach them to speak English and eat our kind of food." Libertarianism says, "If they like their way of doing things, good luck to them and let them have it. Everyone has an emotional attachment to things associated with 'my home' and a shallower interest in things that seem 'new and different from my home'."

O'Rourke's snarky report about being treated to dinners in faddy new "foreign" restaurants, instead of being fed blinis and caviar, during his visit to Moscow, gains something from being considered in this light. I don't imagine most of his readers were pleased by the wisecrack about Russian "stuff" being no good. At least I know that, ten years before O'Rourke went to Moscow, a very senior co-worker of mine did; he brought back souvenirs for everyone at the office, and what I got was the LP record of the men's choir, and I had only even played it once, and then my roommate latched on to it, and if O'Rourke had told me he was going to Moscow I would have asked him to look for that record. Maybe "freedom" would have given somebody the freedom to print the words that time round. I seriously believe that O'Rourke expected his readers to recognize "Russian stuff is no good" as a joke. I think he expected us to understand, "The people I met are fascinated by things that are novel and foreign to them; that's what breaking down a trade barrier will do. They're so fascinated by new, exotic American food that they can't believe I, the American visitor, wanted just once during my visit to Russia to eat Russian food, which is still exotic to me."

I doubt that his hosts were seriously discouraged by the wisecrack "Russian stuff is no good" either. If they were, they're missing an important point about libertarianism, which is not Positive Thinking but is basically a cheerful, goodhearted school of thought. Novelty appeal tends to wear off. Once you've exclaimed "Ooohhh, shiny!" over the imported wrench with the exotic new logo, at the end of the day, a wrench is a wrench is a wrench. The one you want to use should normally be the one that was made closest to you and incurred the least amount of extra expense in getting to you. If that's not the case, the manufacturer closer to you may need to make some changes. Libertarianism recognizes the possibility that Manufacturer A may consistently make a better product than Manufacturer B, such that people who live closer to B are willing to pay more for A's product; that's one of the scenarios libertarians classify as market corrections--leaving those people to pay more for A's product is an effective way to decide whether B needs to improve B's product, or New Manufacturer C needs to move in and displace B, or the market for this particular product is slow enough that A can supply all of it.

Reality-checking...first of all, it's a mistake to take any detail too seriously in a book that's marketed primarily as humor. I'll accept O'Rourke's claim that in the late 1990s, all around the world, a reliable indicator of prosperity was that people were driving Japanese cars. In the early twentieth century certain American manufacturers invented the concept of motorcars for ordinary families; in the late twentieth century certain Japanese manufacturers improved on it, adding innovative concepts like "Everyone on Earth is not six feet tall, and some people, if they must drive cars, prefer to drive cars that aren't designed to be driven by someone who is six feet tall," and "Not only can full-sized cars get forty miles to the gallon--or more--but they can be built in such a way that it's normal for one engine to run for 200,000 miles or more." American manufacturers needed that. It took American manufacturers a while to get the message and so Japanese cars became popular even in the United States.

Libertarian thought tends to focus on the idea that manufacturers should not be protected from this kind of competition, but should be encouraged to learn from it. In the 1990s Honda and Toyota outsold Ford in the U.S. car market. Ford responded by building more small economy cars and a series of big pickup trucks. This kept Ford a leading competitor in the automotive industry and also provides a good example of how market corrections work. Libertarians believe that, when Ford develops both smaller and bigger vehicles, engineering progress is made and humanity benefits.

About "Russian stuff," specifically...much waste and hype went into marketing, not only the specific products of American Industry, but also the Cold War idea that all American products were inherently superior to all Russian products...apart from vodka, considered specifically as an anesthetic, and we had Novocain. It would be nice if others could spare themselves the waste that was our Advertising Age. There is in fact a limited amount of "Russian stuff" that has been so successfully marketed in the U.S. as to have little souvenir value--books that are already available here in English translations, classical music, ballet...and Tetris. About arts and crafts, it should be understood, worldwide, that O'Rourke's comedy persona is a barbarian whose commentary on The Arts has been limited to jokes about unpopular rock bands. If he would know a real handknitted Orenburg shawl if it leaped up and bit him, his books wouldn't mention it. Russians who want to impress him need only design fast inefficient cars. Russians who want to impress more sophisticated people should invite different writers to Moscow--not me, I become boring about my sensitive digestion when faced with unfamiliar food.

O'Rourke may not always be the most tactful of visitors--though presumably his hosts know the kind of thing he writes and want the publicity of having been ridiculed by him--but at least he's never been the boring kind. If you understand that, within his and his primary audience's libertarian frame of reference, snarky criticism is meant to stimulate improvement, you can enjoy his travel stories without guilt. Yes, he bashes every place he visits, but keep reading; he bashes Irish-American Protestant male baby-boomers more than any other kind of people.

This web site has reviewed several other Fair Trade Books by P.J. O'Rourke, and plans to review even more. The vintage volumes available as Fair Trade Books can be purchased for $5 per book plus $5 per package (four books would fit into one package for $25 total) plus $1 per online payment, via U.S. postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or Paypal payment to the address you receive after e-mailing salolianigodagewi that you want to buy these books. From this, we'll send $1 per book, $4 if you order four books, to O'Rourke or a charity of his choice. This author is still alive and writing; please visit his web site, and check out his new books if you can possibly afford them, to show respect.