Memo to the President from P.J. O'Rourke

For those who do not fully comprehend why Obama's path to utopia - Redistribution, aka Socialism - is not self-sustaining, and in fact, is self-consuming, this brief but poignant soliloquy by political satirist P.J. O'Rourke* should make this concept graspable for all.

As President Obama prepares for his second inauguration, legendary humorist P.J. O'Rourke has a message for him: "Zero-sum makes zero sense." He writes in World Affairs:

"But the worst thing that you’ve done internationally is what you’ve done domestically. You sent a message to America in your reelection campaign. Therefore you sent a message to the world. The message is that we live in a zero-sum universe. There is a fixed amount of good things. Life is a pizza. If some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box. You had no answer to Mitt Romney’s argument for more pizza parlors baking more pizzas. The solution to our problems, you said, is redistribution of the pizzas we’ve got—with low-cost, government-subsidized pepperoni somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza parlor owners. In this zero-sum universe there’s only so much happiness. The idea is that if we wipe the smile off the faces of people with prosperous businesses and successful careers, that will make the rest of us grin."


*Patrick Jake "P. J." O'Rourke (born November 14, 1947) is an American political satirist, journalist, writer, and author. O'Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio's game show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!. In the United Kingdom, he is known as the face of a long-running series of television advertisements for British Airways in the 1990s.

He is the author of 17 books, of which his latest, Holidays in Heck, was released November 1, 2011. This was preceded on September 21, 2010, by Don't Vote!-It Just Encourages the Bastards, and on September 1, 2009, Driving Like Crazy with a reprint edition published on May 11, 2010. According to a 60 Minutes profile, he is also the most quoted living man in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous