Considerable quotes

John Hawkins put together a nice collection of quotes from P.J. O'Rourke's new book, Don't Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards. Here are a few of my favorites:

The free market is simply a measurement. The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That's all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can't pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can. -- p.36

I have a twelve-year-old daughter, Muffin. All I hear is, "It's not fair! It's not fair! It's not fair!" I say to her, "Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. You're smart. That's not fair. You were born in the United States of America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better get down on your knees and pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you." -- P. 47-48.

Power, freedom, and responsibility are the main features of our politics. We pay with our freedoms to relieve ourselves of our responsibilities, and this is how others get their power over us. -- P.60

There's only one thing about a government proposal of this complexity that we can be sure of: it won't work. No government proposal more complex than "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" ever works, and that one hasn't been working lately. -- P.145