Having been duped into thinking that P.J. O'Rourke, whose writing makes me laugh, was going to talk about IT and the internet (here's the sentence from the press release: "P. J. will tackle such present day topics as outsourcing, blogs..."), I attended a luncheon in Boston where O'Rourke was flogging his newest book, "On the Wealth of Nations," in which he interprets Adam Smith's famous (and famously impenetrable) tome in his snarky style.

O'Rourke is a conservative--some would even say a libertarian, though he denies it, at least according to a spokesperson at the lunch: "P.J. says, 'I'm not a libertarian.' He says, 'Libertarians launch kamikaze attacks on the air carrier that is the government.'"

Given what he says about government in his books and articles, however, and the fact that he is a sort of scholar in residence at the Cato Institute, Washington's leading libertarian think tank (and sponsor of the luncheon), I wonder if he doth protest a little too much. I imagine O'Rourke tying one of those crazy kamikaze bandanas around his head and keeping a samurai sword at his side every time he sits down at his IBM Selectric typewriter to write.

Unfortunately, O'Rourke said only one funny thing about the internet: "We have entered the world of post-intelligence. I fear we will live to see the day when a person of learning and cultivation is spoken of as being well-blogged."

After the event, in the best journalistic tradition, I pressed him. I tried to get him to expound further on what Adam Smith might have thought about the internet: "Adam Smith and I would be on about the same technological par as being completely confused by all of this," he said, "but Smith said that all interchanges of information are by their nature a good thing for marketplaces. Smith is the original guy to point out that money is information. He said that 'every shilling offered is an argument'--an argument that you should do such and such as it would be for your own benefit. He's the first economic thinker to closely identify information and money. A piece of money is simply a piece of information--a piece of information about what someone is willing to pay for something."

Yes, O'Rourke acknowledged, he has never used a computer and pledged that he never will. "I don't like 'em," he said. "Just too noisy. It's just a lot of visual and mental noise. It doesn't fit with my pace of existence. I prefer books."

Great. The one time I don't research an interview ahead of time and I encounter the biggest Luddite in the western hemisphere--as is clearly stated in his online bio.

I suddenly felt the spark of anger and indignation that I imagine causes every libertarian to become one: That rushing sensation when the world has conspired to screw up your best laid plans and you scream out, either aloud or to yourself, "WHY CAN'T EVERYONE JUST LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE!"

Except I imagine libertarians doing that all day long, every day.

Then I recalled that at the luncheon the guys sitting on either side of me were both in IT, as was the guy at one of those high, awkward, tiny drinking tables they park you at in the foyer before the lunch begins. I started thinking desperately, could there be a pattern here?

Using my most highly developed analytical skills, I asked myself: If the three guys I talked to at a libertarian lunch were all from IT, then are all IT people libertarians? (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Secondarily, is there something about IT and programming that makes its practitioners predisposed to libertarianism?

Satisfied that I had enough for a story (really, you'd be surprised and saddened to know how much of what you read in journalism starts this way) I sat down at my good old IBM ThinkPad and typed in a search in Google.

Sure enough, I came up with unqualified speculation that since programming is highly logical, highly individualistic and contains no shading--you're either right or wrong--it correlates to libertarian thinking. Just the kind of nonsense that seemed to make good sense on a bad day.

Ain't the internet grand? P.J., consider what you're missing!

If you've endured this far, here are some funny things O'Rourke said at the luncheon that have absolutely nothing to do with IT:

On the difficulty of reading The Wealth of Nations:

"Pretty soon Smith gets enmeshed in clarifications, intellectually caught out, Dagwood-like, carrying his shoes up the stairs of exegesis at 3 a.m., expounding his head off, while that vexed and querulous spouse, the reader, stands with arms crossed and slipper tapping on the second-floor landing of comprehension."

On the possibility of a beaver being worth more than a deer:

"Smith said,

'If among a nation of hunters it costs twice the labor to kill a beaver as it does to kill a deer, one beaver should naturally exchange for two deer.'

"I'm going, Wait a minute. Can killing a beaver really be twice as hard as killing a deer? Deer run like hell. We know where the beaver lives. It built a beaver dam. We've got the beaver's home address. I mean even if it does take twice as long to kill a beaver, you know, wading around the beaver pond smacking at Bucky's head with the flat side of a canoe paddle, who wants the beaver? It's not like the nation of hunters is wearing a lot of top hats or something. And after a long day out hunting, take your pick: juicy venison tenderloin or beaver soup?

"In the doghouse of ancient and medieval life, asceticism made us feel less like dogs."

On Adam Smith's theory of the division of labor, or specialization, and his belief in free trade:

"Now this has existed since the cavemen. There was the little wily fellow with the big ideas who would chip the spear points and the courageous oaf who speared the mammoth and the artistic type who made a lovely cave painting of the moment. This leads inexorably to trade... Now, it may have been a stupid trade: Viewing a cave painting cannot be worth 300 pounds of mammoth ham. It may have been a lopsided trade: A starving cave artist gorges himself for months while a courageous oaf of a new art patron stands scratching his head in a Paleolithic grotto."

On trade regulation:

"A coercive trade is where I get the mammoth and the cave painting and the cave and all you get is killed."

On economists:

"Smith invented the concept of Gross Domestic Product and without GDP modern economists would just have nothing to say. They'd be standing around mute in ugly neckties waiting for MSNBC to ask them to be silent on the air."

On money:

"Money has no intrinsic value. Any baby that's eaten a nickel can tell you this. And those of us who are lucky enough to have heard about the Weimar Republic or to have lived through the Carter Administration know it, too."

class="MsoNormal">"Money doesn't buy happiness; it rents it."

On wealth distribution:

"Let's face it. The lower ranks of people do have too much money. I mean look at Britney Spears, or those moneybags buying the chateaus-to-go on my beachfront with the four-barge garage and the Martha bitchin' Stewart kitchen that they cook in about as often as Martha does the dishes."

On government regulation:

"If it weren't for government regulation, the big corporations, executives at companies like Mobil and Enron and Tyco, they could have cheated investors out of millions. Without government restrictions young people might smoke, they might drink, they might even use drugs. Without the strict licensing of medical practitioners the way would be clear for chiropractors, osteopaths, purveyors of aromatherapy. If we didn't have labor unions, 40,000 people would be wage slaves at the Ford Motor company..."

"We need regulation. Without it cheap MP3 downloads from the US are going to put every nose flute band in Peru out of business. Plus, some jobs require protection to make sure they happen in the right place. Somewhere in Mumbai, there is a younger, funnier person who could be doing my job for less. My job could be outsourced. He could let his sense of humor run wild. He could start making Gerald Ford funeral jokes--about how the funeral lasted longer than his administration did. But then who would my in-laws be offended by, who would my wife scold, who would my friends shun?"

On freedom and equality:

"Are we all equal because we showed up? It doesn't work that way at weddings and funerals."

On man's dependence upon society for economic survival:

"The fact is that Robinson Crusoe could not have made it through the week without the use of manufactured goods from the shipwreck and the help of a cannibalistic executive assistant."

On the rights of man:

"[People] are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are steak, beer and bowling balls."

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