Daily Inspiration Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

O'Rourke turns a civics lesson into a sting operation. The line is built like a market aphorism - tidy, inevitable, almost folksy - and then it snaps shut on its target: the comforting belief that regulation is a clean, technocratic fix. By repeating "bought and sold" and pivoting from goods to people, he treats corruption not as a moral anomaly but as a predictable secondary market created by the primary one. If you make politics the gate through which commerce must pass, commerce will do what it does best: price the gate.

The specific intent is less "all government is bad" than "power concentrates value, and value attracts bidders". It's libertarian in instinct, but the cleverness is that he doesn't argue policy details; he argues incentives. Legislation becomes a scarce resource, and scarcity is the mother of rent-seeking. The subtext is accusatory and mischievous: the more elaborate the rulebook, the more lucrative the rule-writers. It's also a jab at reformist naivete, the idea that you can solve the problem of money with more politics without money simply migrating into the new chokepoints.

Context matters: O'Rourke came up in the late-20th-century American mood of post-Watergate suspicion and Reagan-era market faith, when lobbying was professionalizing and deregulation was a banner. The quote’s cynicism lands because it flatters the reader’s realism while keeping the joke sharp: not only is the system corruptible, it’s tradable, and the transaction is the first one that happens.