Book: Don't Vote!

Overview
P. J. O'Rourke's 2010 book Don't Vote! It Just Encourages the Bastards is a satirical manifesto for small government and skeptical citizenship. Written at the crest of post–financial crisis politics, it blends comic rant, layman's political philosophy, and journalistic observation to argue that politics is a poor tool for solving most human problems. The title is a provocation: not a literal boycott of the ballot box so much as a warning that voting can tempt citizens to indulge in wishful thinking about what government can do without cost, consequence, or coercion.

Structure and voice
The book is arranged as a sequence of essays that move from first principles to contemporary controversies. O'Rourke adopts the pose of a mordant field guide, translating the abstractions of political theory into everyday terms and absurd analogies. He toys with axioms and mock rules of thumb to expose the logical endpoints of modern policy. The tone is breezy and profane, yet the argument is disciplined: liberty precedes policy, and the state's legitimate roles are narrow, mostly confined to keeping the peace and enforcing contracts.

Core themes
Individual liberty is the organizing idea. O'Rourke treats freedom as a practical condition rather than a romantic slogan: the freedom to keep what one earns, to choose, to err, and to bear the cost of choices. From that starting point he develops a consistent skepticism toward centralized solutions. He insists that politics is not charity and government money is not free; every benefit has a burdensome twin in taxation, regulation, debt, or lost autonomy. He also targets utopianism on both left and right. Progressive plans to engineer fairness, conservative impulses to police virtue, and bipartisan dreams of technocratic mastery all, in his telling, underestimate complexity and invite overreach.

Targets and takedowns
Politicians appear as salesmen of impossibilities, and voters as their eager marks. Entitlement programs are examined as long-running promises whose math does not add up. Tax policy becomes a comedy of loopholes and incentives that distort behavior and reward interest groups. Bureaucracy is less malevolent conspiracy than inevitable muddle: rules metastasize, accountability diffuses, and risk-taking shrinks. O'Rourke borrows from basic economics to argue that markets disperse information and correct errors more reliably than ministries and committees, even when markets are messy.

Contemporary flashpoints
Writing amid bailouts, stimulus debates, and the passage of health care reform, he treats the 2008 crash as a parable of moral hazard and policy hubris. The urge to rescue every failure and insure every risk, he argues, socializes losses and privatizes political credit. Health care reform is criticized as a well-meant expansion of control that will entangle patients, doctors, and taxpayers in a thicket of mandates. Climate policy, education reform, and foreign interventions get the same treatment: noble aims, faulty incentives, and a tendency to confuse intent with outcome.

Satire as method
The humor is not decorative; it functions as a stress test. By pushing arguments to their extremes, by juxtaposing lofty rhetoric with ground-level consequences, O'Rourke dramatizes the gap between political promise and lived reality. The jokes land because they rest on recognitions about human nature: self-interest, limited knowledge, and the temptations of power.

Takeaway
Don't Vote! urges readers to invert their civic priorities. Vote if you must, he implies, but invest more hope in ordinary freedom than in extraordinary leaders. Restrain politics so private life can expand. Treat government as a necessary but dangerous tool, not a secular church. The punch lines serve a serious end: to defend a cheerful, skeptical, responsibility-minded version of American liberty against the earnest fantasies of problem-solvers with other people’s money.