The lastest P.J. O’Rourke book isn’t technically one of his books. It is called P. J. O’Rourke on The Wealth of Nations and is hopefully the first installment of a series of commentaries called “Books That Changed the World”.
Modern authors, so the idea goes, will be matched up with classic works and authors to create a thinking man’s Cliff’s Notes.
All that said, here is why this is a fantastic read.
Smith wrote that the “rapine and violence which the barbarians exercised” left western Europe “sunk into the lowest state of poverty.” Commerce was destroyed, towns were deserted, fields were left uncultivated. But although the rule of law and the legal title to property that goes with it were destroyed, the result was not “Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can.” Nothing in the ruined Roman Empire was, as Smith reminded us, “left without a proprietor.” A vacuum of power is not filled with pop idol musings, nor with anarcho-syndicalists either. A vacuum of power is filled with more and worse power.
Useful information to those who think history began in 1968.
The commentary goes on to say how it was commerce that first led to the concept of freedom that we understand today. Traders formed primitive corporations which would handle paying rents to lords and landholders. Lords loved getting the rents without having to interfere in the day to day businesses and the messy task of collections. This left them plenty of free time to pursue their pleasures.
The traders and producer, being free to trade and produce began to become wealthy.
Continuing on with the nature of medieval lords (and what appears to be celebrities):
All for ourselves, nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons.
For a pair of diamond buckles perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged … the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them. The buckles, however, were to be all their own, and no other human creature was to have any share of them; whereas in the more ancient method of expence they must have shared with at least a thousand people … and thus for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest and the most sordid of all vanities, they gradually barted their whole power and authority.
To which P. J. masterfully summarizes:
Never complain that the people in power are stupid. It is their best trait. In recent years we’ve seen a variety of powerful figures barter their authority for the gratifications of childish vanities. Perhaps the Saudi royal family will be next to suffer the fate that Adam Smith described…
Posted by Cranky @ 11:34 am
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