Issues. Is this picture on the left a real picture of you . Yes. Not the week . Not a week spirit when was that taken . I would guess 71. Not quite positive. What were your politics 1971 . I think a martian left would be the easiest way to sum it up. I was a left winger, but it didnt make enough sense to actually be a communist are trotskyite or anything like that. Went to the transformation occur. When did the transformation occur . I just wrote about this. There is a book coming out from the Hoover Institution is backing this, called why i turned right, and its the story of a bunch of us and why we became right. It is a long store and i wont tell it but ill give the short version of it. 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 when it appeared he dont the week is a lot of money is forced i was concerned. I was living doubt on the Lower East Side and i was very broke. I get paid every two weeks. I was really looking forward to that 300 bucks. And so was my landlord, i may say. And my drug dealer among other people. I got my first paycheck and i netted out like 178 or Something Like that. Its supposed to be 300 bucks, but after federal taxes, estate tax, city tax, Social Security, health care, Retirement Fund which i really cared a lot about in those days. I said wait a minute, ive been advocating socialist, marxist, communist for years screaming and yelling and demonstrating in the street. And we all already have it. They just took half my pay. Im not rockefeller. They just took half my pay. We have socialism. Thats when i started to snap out of it. Took less. Somebody else who made the switch in their politics is Christopher Hitchens, and much more recently. Right, but back in 1993 i believe heres what he had to say about you. Hes a guy who gets what my pain with murder. Hes another exleftist, 60s radical dropout wrote very fondly about what its like being probally stoned and bombed that an paranoid in the 60s. Then became a young republic has been cashing in this chip ever since and has terrific following as a humorist for his books and essays. The first one quite funny is called Republican Party reptile. The next one was called, is called holidays and hill and the recent one is called give war a chance. These cell capable among the young much better than any of my books ever had and it gets me down. It is my revenge upon him. I made it. He has hes a good guy to hang out with and more. Ive reckon you is running on empty with this joke about i know ive been there. Ive been the radical now i i e how wonderful it would be to be a completely buttoned up buttondown tory. The joke basically depends on a satire on political correctness. Okay, so people try not to make jokes about eight. P. J. Will make the joke about eight. Its that funny to left that cripples. I said look, in the words of the title, thats quite funny but its not funny enough. Christopher christopher christopher. Getting away with murder. I might get away with slander, verbal assault. I dont think of everything got away with i just a little guy and cowardly. Ive never even got away with physical assaults i think he overstates the case. And also of course i am long past the point what i can claim to be up young republican, buttoneddown or not. Im an old republican now. I close middleaged white guys. We are all republicans even if we sometimes call ourselves Something Else like democrat. You did know you would get attacked, did you . Holidays in hell is another p. J. Orourke book. P. J. Orourke, all the trouble in the world. Modern manners, connecticut book for rude people. First book. When was it is put out . The original edition was 1983. Eat the rich. What was this about . Eat the rich is what got started me on what ended up being at the smith which have simply puzzled. I didnt understand why some countries a rich and other countries are poor. I started poking around going to rich countries and poor countries and tried try to seei could figure out why this country was rich and other countries were poor. It was from that experience that toby munday, the editor in england who came up with this idea for a for a series of boo, books that changed the world, of which my book on how the smith is what an Christopher Hitchens has one also on thomas paine, the rights of man. In very good it is. It was because of some at the smith come poking around in ad and smith that toby asked me to write on adam smith. You are on with p. J. Orourke. Go ahead. Are you with us . New jersey, go ahead. Caller i am not sure by mr. Orourke deserves to be taken seriously or be given all this time on your show. When a man who i suspect never wore the uniform and i suspect from rick about his politics in the vietnam area would a dentist artist to avoid wearing the uniform can be so utterly flippant about war. We have a war now that we should not have had by my likes and i happen to have been a republican for 50 years voting three times Richard Nixon and twice for ronald reagan. Thousands of americans have been killed, tense if that hundreds of thousands of iraqis have been killed. No useful purposes is served by this war and a think its abominable that mr. Orourke can make fun of war and can find something amusing about it. But the question i wanted to you is, he talks about the imperative of free markets. Does mr. Orourke have any conception of why we have things i can minimumwage law, ask him our laws and osha laws . Does he remember the conditions that exist in america before we had those laws and the way laborers were obliged to work 12 hour days, six days we . Is that what he thinks is freedom . Thank you. Well get to the free market question that he had in just a second but in speeded that was one republican. It was on the democratic light action. Im glad he came in on the democratic light. Into dedication to give war a chance, heres what you write. Like many meant by generation i had an opportunity to get a chance and a promptly chickened out. I went to my credit physical in 1970 with the doctors letter about the history of drug abuse. The letter with four and half pages long with three enough pages devoted to listing the drug i had abuse. I was moved into the office of the psychiatrist at the end of the 45 minute interview with me was how to his desk and shouting you dont belong in the army picky was certainly right on the first count and possibly write on the second. I didnt had to go but that of course met someone 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 you are more used to your platoon mates than it would have been. I hope youre rich and happy now, and it may consider what would somebody punched me in the face of being the longer piece great, i hope that was you. I have a couple nice list because of that dedication from people who thought maybe that punched me in the face and said they appreciated it. To begin with the beginning of what the file on the phone said, ive never asked anybody to take me 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 of things in order to cope with her own terror, our own unease, our own existential horror, our anger at god, our disappointment with ourselves, et cetera and so forth. Schumer is a defense mechanism. You can drink, you can make a joke, you can take drugs, you can make yourself all pompous and pious, or you could all of those things at once. Whether i i make fun of for our dont make fun of for unfortunately will not make war better nor is it going to make worse. As to free market and minimumwage and people working in coal mines and working 49 hours a day, nine days a week and so on and so forth, its interesting when you say youre in favor of free market immediately get that response from lots of people. Its not of course at all what adam smith met. What adam smith was talking about was keeping coercion out of life and keeping coercion out of marketplaces is only one aspect of keeping coercion out of life. Adam smiths whole the wealth of nations, the essays that he wrote, a very important book he wrote that no one reads the more called the theory of moral sentiments which is about morality was all about making people rely upon persuasion and to give up brute force. That is the core of morality. Its the core of a free society. Its the core of democracy even though adam smith in some ways didnt know that. He lived in a predemocratic era. He didnt quite understand that democracy could work. But he did understand the freedom could work. He was a moral and a practical and just a plain sort of sympathetic advocate afraid of. 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 doesnt mean that you what markets ruled by anarchy. It implies a rule of law and it implies that we are all equal before the law. It is not prescriptive. It 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 that we should all obey the rules but it doesnt say quite exactly what those rules are. In book five of the wealth of nations adam smith tries to lay down some rules. He tries to take his theories and make them prescriptive, actually give us political policy. He becomes a policy wonk. Its interesting, its the one failed the book in the wealth, there are five books in the wealth of nations. The fifth book stinks. When adam smith turns into a policy wonk he becomes as foolish as the rest of of the student when we become policy wonks. He becomes like theyve had in this white house and likely will have in this congress. So to the very angry caller, i would just like to say this first i have no idea why three hours should be wasted on me and im not going to say there is a good reason. They asked me. What can i tell you . But because you have certain ideas how freedom should be conducted and you may well be right and i respect those ideas and those ideas are worth arguing about, but dont just because you want to limit certain freedoms in the market. You may be wise and it may be the correct thing to do to limit those freedoms but dont be smug about your desire to limit freedom. Everybody who wants to limit freedom from those who desire that there be human slavery to the taliban, to people who are in favor of minimum wage laws, everybody is smug about their desire to limit human freedoms. Some human freedoms really do need to be limited. That doesnt make you a good person for recognizing that. It may make you a wise person or a sensible person, assuming your arguments are good but youre not a good person. You deserve no smugness and you dont deserve to be, to vent your anger on foolish innocent humorous just because you have some desire to limit, so there. P. J. Orourke has appeared on booktv close to 20 times over the past 20 years. Up next he provides a tribute to the american automobile while discussing his book driving like crazy. This event was held at the Peterson Automotive Museum in los angeles in june 2009. It is im afraid the last time to say, how shall we put it, sayonara to the american car. American automobile companies, ford, gm, chrysler will live on in some form, a kind of marleys ghost dragging their chains at taxpayers expense. The fools in the corner offices of detroit and the fool officials at detroit units will retire to the vacation homes in palm beach and st. Petersburg respectively. They dont deserve our sympathy anymore than the malevolent trolls under the capitol dome in washington do but pity the poor american car when congress and the white house get through with it. A lightweight vehicle with a small Carbon Footprint using alternative energy and Renewable Resources to operate in a sustainable way. When i was a kid we called it a schwinn. I guess its been a great 110 years, it has been a great run. 110 years since the brothers of built the first automobile in springfield, massachusetts. And if itd been a success springfield, massachusetts, i be todays motor city full of abandoned houses, unemployment, drug dealing, Violent Crime and racial tension, which as a so happens springfield, massachusetts, is full of anyway. But we owe the american car, we owe it 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 backseat. Where if you check our parents wedding anniversary with our birthdate and find them a little too close to comfort that is probably where we were conceived. There was no premarital sex and america before the invention of the internal combustion engine. Its true. You couldnt sneak a girl into the rec room of your farmhouse because your mom and dad didnt have a car so he couldnt commute so they were stuck home all day working on the farm. Your farmhouse didnt have rec room because recreation had not been discovered due to all the farm work. Odd saturday that you could take your girl out in a buggy but it was hard to get her into the mood to let you bust into her corset because you were facing behind in of the course and it just spoils the atmosphere. The cars let us out of the barn and while the car was added the car destroyed the American Nuclear family and anyone whos had an American Nuclear family can tell you that was a relief to all concerned. Cars caused america to be paved. There are much worse things you do to the country than pave it as the sudanese have proven over in darfur. One of the things i wonder is we never hear a thank you, not a word of thanks as car people forget all america paid for the kids in the body cast who skateboard all the time. Not a word of thanks. Cars provided america with an in the oval standard of living. Enviable. You could not get a steady job with high wages and Health Retirement benefits working on the general Livestock Corporation assemblyline putting utters on cows. It just couldnt be done. The american car was a source of intellectual stimulation, intellectual stimulation. Think of the innovation. The invention, the sheer genius that transformed the 1908 model t 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 transportation. Horse production, horse design unchanged for thousands of years. When it comes to creativity with the horse i did research on this when i was writing about the stuff. I looked at it. Nobody thought to put a stirrup, nobody thought to hang a stirrup from a saddle until about 500 a. D. , the stirrup was invented. People have been riding horses for thousands of years and took them until 500 a. D. To invent this. Where were they putting their feet . If automobile design and engineering had proceeded at the same pace as horse design and engineering we would be powering ourselves down the road by running with both our feet stuck through hole on the floor like fred flintstone, although it may come to that with the 2010 obama mobile. But most important of all, most important of all was the cars fulfilled the ideal of americas founding fathers. Of all the truths that we hold to be self evident, 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 out of here. King george, can i have the keys . Thats in the declaration of independence. I have to tell you the saga of the american car, this is not an abstract matter to me. This is the subject of fanciful theories. Nancy pelosi may think she was transported home from the Maternity Ward on pink fluffy clouds supported by seraphim. Low carbon seraphim. But i know it was the car that got me to where i am. My grandfather, jacob, he was born in 1877. He was he was born on a farm about the size of this podium here. In lime city, ohio, which is not a city and didnt even have any lime. He was one of ten kids. Grandpa was one of ten kids who grew up in a oneroom unpainted shack. I have a photograph of them lined up by age staring at the photographer amazed to see someone in shoes. My greatgrandfather barney was a woodcutter in the midwest where there are no trees. Unemployed quite a lot. Also drunk, also illiterate. Ive got a copy of his marriage certificate with his x right there. His only accomplishment aside from the prices he want on a corn shocks stuffing, he trained a pair of old next to hold him home dead drunk. He would fall out of the tavern, pass out in the wagon and the horses would bring him home. That is what he accomplished in his life. Grandpa jake left home armed with a fifthgrade education heading for the bright lights of toledo, ohio. And he went to work as a buggy mechanic, a buggy mechanic, and then one day a horseless buggy pulled up at the shop and grandpa saw that and he saw the future. He fixed that, too, and it didnt take grandpa along to realize clean hands were dead and more money was to be made selling those things is that repairing them. So anyway he got in the car business and by the time that i came along in the 1940s we had a buick law. We all worked out on the car lot cleaning and waxing the cars. My cousin would go on to run the a while Car Dealer Association and i would go on to do whatever it is that i do in this book, write about cars and stuff. Even in these dark days for the american automobile there are times i wish id stayed in toledo and taken over the agency. Those latenight tv local car dealership ads, i got this whole idea of want to do hybrid hats Treasure Island buick. Come out with a parrot on my shoulder and one of those big cats, and eyepatch come on down to pirate patch where prices walk the plank. Dont miss our pieces of v8 usedcar lot for free chocolate doubloons for the kids. Been a great life. Grandpa died in 1960, honors from the rotary and lions club and the moose lodge. My family, we owe everything o the american car. Without the car we couldnt read and have food and stuff. So our history begins with the beginning of the american c