a game works on parts of government. you kill the postal service, merry the armed forces, screw agriculture subsidies, mary social security and healthcare reform tells us. great tools because in a free and democratic country politics is a stool balanced on a tripod of power, freedom, and responsibility. we live in a free and democratic he. a little less democratic than

it was before last night. also a great tool of political analysis because we are so passionate about our politics and how do passionate affairs end? and a passion, usually coming in a crime of passion sometimes and occasionally they turn into stable, permanent legal arrangements which is to say the endless. this quarrel known as marriage so how do we approach the political institutions of our free and democratic country, do we ever grow throw them with violence, do we screw around cheating on them while based cheat on us or do we try to build something lasting and boring but worthy and annoying, marvelously virtuous and at the same time dreadfully stifling, a marriage, power, freedom, responsibility. when i first began to think about politics when mastodons

and nixon roamed the earth i was upset with the freedom, the screw part of kill screw mary. i had a messy idea of freedom in those days, but i had a tidy idea that freedom was the central issue of politics. i loved politics, many young people do, kids can spot a means of gain without merit. this may be the reason professional politicians retain a certain youthful zest. ted kennedy was the boy owed john to his last aged disease moment. i was wrong about the lovable nature of politics and i was sure i was right about the preeminent place freedom should have in a political system but there are lots of definitions

of free, 36 definitions of free and webster's third international dictionary, plenty of people are theoretically in favor of freedom. we are all but overrun with theoretical allies. we have got collaborators in the fight for freedom that we don't even want. the probably jerry owens have nothing to lose but their chains, sentence second to last sentence of the communist manifesto and there is a creepy echo of it in the refrain of me and bobby mcgee. mao announced letting 100 flowers blossom and 100,000 schools of thought, half 1 million people d not -- died in a definition of freedom and we should keep in mind that the original definition of the word free in english is not in bondage. the most meaningful thing about freedom is mankind has a sickening history of slavery. here in america we have freedom

because we have rights. the same way we can get mixed up about freedom we can get mixed up about our rights. there are two kinds of rights, political scientists call them positive rights and negative rights. sometimes we call them opportunities and privileges. i call them get out of here rights and give me rights. politicians are always telling us about our give me rights especially the politician we've got in the white house right now as in give me some healthcare insurance. our bill of rights doesn't mention any give me rights. our bill of rights is all about our freedom to say i have got god, guns and big damn mouth and if the jury finds the guilty the judge will blow my bail. this is a got a right to our right to be left alone, freedom of interference usually from government but also our fellow citizens when they want us to quit yelling, put the gun down

and go back in the trailer. politicians don't like give me rights, they only like give me rights, they do not like get out of here rights. they don't like get out of here rights because for one thing all legislators are being invited to get out of here. for another thing strict adherence to get out of here rights would leave little scope for legislation, something legislators dearly love to do. give me rights much more politically alluring and that is how we find ourselves tempted with a right to education, right to housing, right to a living wage, to all you'll still beach cleanup, high-speed internet access, three french and the two turtledoves at a partridge in a pear tree. politicians show no sign of knowing the difference between get out of here and give me rights. blinded by the dazzle of anything that makes them popular they honestly may not be able to tell but there is

evidence that a confusion of these rights was originally presented to the public with malice and forethought. president franklin roosevelt's four freedoms appear at first glance as natural and tidy of composition as those norman rockwell illustrations, freedom of speech, freedom from want, freedom from fear but notice how number 3, freedom from want has slipped in among the more respectable members of the freedom family. want what? we ask. saying as roosevelt did that we look forward to a world founded on four eccentric human freedoms and one of these is freedom of want this was not an expression of generosity from roosevelt. declarations like freedom from want i never expressions of generosity. there were 6 million jews in europe who wanted nothing but a

safe place to go and where was roosevelt there? when rights consist of special privileges and positive benefits, rights kill freedom. wrong rights are the source of abusive political power. it was years before i realized this. years after i first got interested in politics before i realized the central issue of politics is power, not freedom. kill, not screw. only an idiot wouldn't have seen this and i was one. i wasn't alone. liberals, moderates, even some conservatives considered the sweeping give me rights created by half a century of social welfare programs to be extensions of freedom and the opportunity rights since, people were given the opportunity to not starve to death. it is not a purely evil way of looking at things and not all the social welfare programs

were bad but the electorate, the candidates him and me, failed to properly scrutinize social welfare programs. it was not that we failed to examine whether they were needed or needed a well or poorly run but we failed to look at the enormous power being taken from power and given to politics, we let freedom be turned into power. f off and die the politicians told us. politicians are careless about promising give me rights, sinful about delivering them. give me rights in turn are absurdly expandable. the government gives me the right to get married. this indicates i have a right to a good marriage otherwise why bother giving that right to me? my marriage is made a lot better by my children's right to daycare so the brats aren't in my face all day. being deprived of their right to a nurturing development environment. every child has the right to a happy childhood so i have the

right to happy children, richard children are happier, give me some of angelina jolie's. the expense of all these rights makes politicians happy they get to do the spending. even get out of here rights aren't free, they entail a military, constabulary, judiciary and considerable expenditure of haitians by our neighbors when they want us to sober up, put the gun and go back in the trailer but give me rights and require no end of money and money is the least of their costs. every one of such rights means the transfer of goods and services from one group of citizens to another. the first group of citizens loses those goods and services but all citizens lose the power that must be given to a political authority to enforce that transfer. we didn't, we didn't want to understand that power and this

is particularly true of people of my age, the baby boom and it was obviously the way we react when politicians attempted to use their power to limit our freedom by drafting us into the war in vietnam. we thought the establishment by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. a pathetic bunch. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2. we are taking a look at other programs with political satirist p.j. o'rourke. a former editor in chief of national lampoon. in 2014 he offered a critique of the baby boom generation, one of the 70 million boomers and referred to relationships with his parents and children. >> we are the generation that changed everything. all the eras and epics of america, ours is the one that made the biggest impression on ourselves.

but that is an important accomplishment because we are the generation that created the self, made the firmament of the self, divided the light of the self from the darkness of the south and c let there be self. if you were born between 1946, in 1964 you may have noticed this yourself. this is not to say we are selfish generation. selfish means too concerned with self and we are not, self is not something we're just concerned with. we are self. before us, self was without form and void like our parents in their dumpy clothes. then we came along and now the person is the socioeconomic, the personal is the religious and secular, the science and the arts, the personal is everything that creeps upon the

earth, if the baby boom has done one thing it is to be get a personal universe and apologies to anyone who has to personally be a jerk. self is kind of like fish proverbially speaking, give a man a fish and you feed him for their, teach him for a day and he turns into a dry fly catch and release angler fanatic. a 3 pound test line, thousand dollar graphite rod, at least his life partner is glad to have him out of the house. here we are in the baby boom cosmos formed in our image, personally tailored to our individual needs and predetermined to be eternal he fresh and novel and we saw that it was good or pretty good. we should have had a cooler name, the lost generation did. good luck to anyone who tells

us to get lost. too late now. we are stuck with being described as exploding and vincent. now that we have splattered ourselves all over the place i'm for the baby boom to look back and think what made us who we are and what caused us to act the way we do and what the - the truth is if we hadn't decided to be young forever we would be old. the youngest baby boomers born in the last year when anybody thought was hip to like lyndon johnson are turning 50, and we would be sad about getting old if we weren't busy remarrying younger wives and reviving careers with glass ceilings

when children arrived in renewing prescriptions to drugs that keep us from being sad and we will never retire, we can't, the mortgage is underwater, we are in debt up to the rogaine of the kids college education and serves us right because we are the generation that insisted the passion for living should replace working for one. it is an appropriate moment for us to weigh what we have wrought and tally what we added and subtracted from existence, reached the age of accountability, the world is our fall, we are the generation that has an excuse for everything. one of our greatest contributions to modern life but the world is still our fault, a matter of power and privilege demography. when anything happens anywhere somebody over 50 signed the bill for it and the baby boom,

seated as we are at life's table, this urine generation x, generation y in the millennials all say check please. [applause] >> i also chose another just a couple paragraphs to ask p.j. o'rourke to read you, do you need your reading glasses? >> yes. they have big type of. >> near the end of the book is a bit of a summing up so you can see sort of where p.j. o'rourke lands with this. >> turn the page, got it. and yet we are the best generation in history which goes to show three things. we are fabulous by historical standards. the baby boom was a carefully

conducted scientific experiment, the empirical results are us, you take the biggest generation in the most important country and put them all into excessively happy families, given too much expansion, extravagant freedoms and responsibility, plenty of money, modicum of peace if they dodged the draft, profusion of opportunity and collapse of traditional social standards and you get better people. not better, really. taken one by one where is maddeningly smug and able as people of always been but we are better behaved although we are willful and careless, rash, vein, entitled but we are still swelled. >> love that, thank you. so this book has an interesting

structure. the chapters are essay length and you blend in some real memoir stuff about your life along with a lot of broader thinking about baby boomers and how we got this way. you start by, as we all know, the baby boom started in 1946, lasted, the last year of the baby boom 1964 so you were born on one end of the spectrum, i on the other although it is a defining characteristic of baby boomers that we all look the same age. >> guest: about 18 by rough estimation. >> host: you describe the baby boom experience as seniors, high school, seniors, juniors, sophomores and freshmen, you were in the senior class.

>> guest: it is me, share, hillary clinton, bill, cheech. seniors are like we read the bow wave of this voyage of exploration but also tethered very closely behind our parents, the greatest generation. we got dragged under the boat. if we wound up a little foggy as financial advisors with tongue studs or trying to start tea party protests we are to be forgiven. >> host: your senior class was on a guard of so many things including vietnam and drug taking and by the time the

freshman class came along, in my case, the youngest of four, i watched my three older siblings do all these things and it scared me witless and i did none of those things. i grew up in the 50s. >> host: younger baby boomers are more cautious, they embrace sex, drugs and rock 'n roll in a deep philosophical underpinning thereof but they have seen us in action, they've seen the older baby boomers in action and know what works in general doesn't always work when the bomb sets fire to the beanbag chair. baby boom gets better behaved as it goes along. >> host: one delightful aspect of this book is you start by describing what sounds like a very early memory in toledo, ohio, where you are watching the world through the picture window of your family's

brand-new house. >> guest: standing there, too young to go to school and watching kids go to school, one of my first memories. this is the silent generation was a moment of silence out there. it just seemed -- at this moment all generations's kids wanted to be grown-ups except us. we wanted to be bigger kids. that is a vowel we kind of kept. >> host: you make an observation about childhood that struck me. children of baby boom children were in control of their own childhood. our parents worked as children, our children worked like maniacs and yet we were a generation, are a generation of people with childhoods.

>> host: get out of the house, it is a beautiful day, it is raining, said it was a beautiful day. i never quite figured out the parenting style. we take a lot of grief as parenting, our parents were strange, they could be so cautious and so fearful, don't get to know people who are not from europe, that would be scary, for the fourth of july would come around and there are some explosives that should take a license. everybody -- uncle mikey mike, this was more -- my businessman

and uncle did this was he would give us firecrackers on the fourth of july. he give us a lit cigarette. not to smoke, it is a safe way. they drank, real strict all day long. and helps to 6:30. i know i'm only 10 but can i take the car? >> host: in 2017 p.j. o'rourke published a book on the 2016 election entitled "how the hell did this happen?: the election of 2016". in march of this year he spoke of the commonwealth club of san francisco to provide his thoughts on donald trump and the reasons for his victory. here is a portion.

>> how can a person like donald trump possibly become a president. maybe it is a matter of what the great political satirist hl mencken said. democracy is the theory the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. more likely part of something larger. we are not alone in having a political awkward moment. we are in the midst of a global revolt against the political elites who created the post-world war ii international order and for the past few years have been running everything, running everything into the ground as far as a lot of ordinary voters are concerned. internationally we are seeing a rise in the xena phobia, jingoism and authoritarianism,

it ranges from the comic spectacle of the european union to the deeply sinister activities of vladimir putin and xi jinping, taking measurements for a new -- you think this would seem worse than a mere standard issue, of jim busch or hillary clinton. the political elites in part create their own problem. over the past four generations, political power is expanded. the politicians and government around the world, one of the things you make is grabbed by government. if your cat has three kittens, one of them is a government agent.

political power is expanded in scope. politics cast its net over every aspect of life. it isn't tangled, politics is crap, now we find out where we take one is a political issue. i have to say to the political elites where you going to realize politics is a 2 way street. the elite politicians create a powerful, huge heavy unstoppable monster truck of a government in the same elite politicians when a horrible politician who they detest gets behind the wheel, and runs them over. they need to make the truck smaller, yank the engine and install foot pedals.

and being us in the chins. we are sick of the elites. what we have, grabbing everything we've got, we see this revolt against the elites in the brexit vote. we see it in the rise of alternative political parties in europe on both ends of the political spectrum, greens on elected nationalists on the right, we see it in brazil, left, right, middle of the road, has been charged with corruption for the simple reason they are guilty of. in the case of brexit, business

elite and trade union elite, they were all opposed to brexit, the people who supported the iraq war plus the people who caused the 2000 the global financial crisis and people who nationalize the british automobile industry, they were all in unprecedented agreement on one issue and voters felt it couldn't go wrong voting against this trifecta. columbia's elites spent five years negotiating a peace treaty with a starving rabble of communist guerrillas, the plea besides, ratified that agreement, to ask what? after 52 years of murder, kidnapping, pillage, theft and trafficking in narcotics.

even politics of australia, the name of the conservative party is the liberal party but australia had five prime ministers and six years. in this last election nearly resulted in a hung parliament. and probably illegal to accept when parliamentarians chasing sheep. politics in canada even dollar than the politics of australia. i haven't googled canadian politics because who would. i assume justin -- here in america we saw the revolt against the elites and the

ridiculous rise of donald trump and thinking okay, understand the desire to shake things up but why trump of all people? trump may be a rich guy, a member of the one person like he says he is, there is nothing elite for sure, nothing elite about the way he sounds, sound like the rest of us except he sounds like us after we had six drinks and doesn't even drink. he is a jerk. you can imagine playing around of golf with him. cheats, but so do i. imagine a round of golf with hillary clinton, she has 20 harvard graduate caddies, read all the books about golf but have ever been on the links, spend the whole match telling you, not her but you what club to use in the secret service is there to make sure you take hillary's advisor's suggestion

and after your chip shot, the pin gets moved closer to hillary's. and the scorecard winds up on hillary's personal email server. on the other hand i don't know if i could stand how long i would last a round of golf with donald trump before i gave into temptation to whack a titleist into the back of his skull to create an alternative fact about how close it is to the whole. global revolt against the elites, in many ways it is puzzling. i didn't feel the power of this myself when i was reporting on this. in the beginning of the 21st century seems like an odd time to have a revolt against the elites especially in a country like ours where things are going fairly well.

and waking up on friends couches, everybody in america had a divorce the we have been through that before. and loaves of been slim, it abides, we are broiled in a long war, 7000 american combatants have died during 50 years of the war on terror but more than 7800 american combatants died at the battle of gettysburg. streets are not filled with protesters against the war we are in now, hippies are not sticking daisies in drum owners, we are culturally and politically polarized in america these days, it would

not start donald school history professor and jolted awake from his nap in the faculty line. that was polarized. the american people are fearful and they blame their fears on the political elite. one of the reasons for this, the political elite have done a lousy job, demons have been unleashed in the middle east. elites failed to address the problems that cause the demons to be unleashed, elites seem to have been breeding demons for elite diplomacy, geopolitics and elite military policy. they turn demons loose in the middle east, as if the elites were trying to reintroduce

demons. one result has been murder in the world. and in a gay nightclub in orlando. another result of this mishandling of the middle east is the refugee crisis in europe and the europeans are going what to do the elites care, refugees are not crowding the stairways and jostling the elites in the halls of the european parliament in brussels. refugees are not building shantytowns on the tennis courts it means nannies and the new ethnic restaurants. elites don't seem able to see any similarity between the wall donald trump promised us in the gated communities.

and they promised the politics, you fix everything. if political elites say politics can fix climate change, i want to see bill clinton shoveling my driveway. i know he has heart trouble but thanks to global warming my driveway only had a few inches of snow. the global revolt against the elites, adding blamed for everything, we live in a time of rapid change, a number of people worldwide living in extreme poverty on a dollar a day, reduced by half since the year 2000, an amazing marvelous

project and also despite some recent back sliding there has been overall growth in human liberty for the past 30 years since the 1989 fall of the berlin wall. to be fair to the elites, rapid change creates problems for them too, speedy transformation in the social mores, economic norms, confuses everybody especially those who thought they were leaving the mores, norms and given this parade. mankind no longer has to marginalize, people are becoming individual persons instead of masses on review. certain difficulties arrives on the parade grounds, when the band breaks up it can leave the tuba to be turned into a beerbohm and the bass drums

sitting on the curve, the trombonist using his slide to goose the cornet player and nobody left who can spell glockenspiel and the elite drum major standing in the middle of the street waving a stick. swift improvements in transport, in communication, technical capabilities to produce this thing we call globalization, international trade, we love everything from everywhere being brought to our door except when we don't, we love going to yellowstone park but how much we love having the trees, the tourists and the bears, we need to clean the carpet.

a smaller place now, this makes the political elites, the smaller world will make everyone get along. take them to see the world to yellowstone national park. for family car trips, political elites don't fly economy class. and the wrong person to ask, i got myspace figure out only to discover the only person on myspace is me. concerning the internet whose bright idea, every idiot in the world in communication with

every other idiot. i take on trust the digital revolution change everything. for all i know it has done so already. didn't there used to be a bookstore, where did sears go? i am glad i can comparison shop to buy any brand that exists and have it delivered for free shipping, the kenmore repairman at sears hasn't listed as a foot soldier in america's opioid addiction attack, how do i get my refrigerator into the ups dropbox? all changes disruptive, all change is scary, changing a diaper, frightening people asking for spare change on the street, when contemporary,

social and economic change are combined with contemporary distrust of political elites, in some cases been earned the results could be disturbing. russia's ugly nationalism comes from vladimir putin harnessing popular outrage at the incompetent kleptomaniac political elites who took possession of russia, xi jinping's neo maoism, popular anger that all the tea in china scale of corruption among chinese elites and there are anti-elite aspects to a fanatical interpretation of g.i. isis terrorists hate elites so much that they have suicide squads of elites who go around killing themselves. modern world is a scary world and fear is a bad -- we have a monster at the blackboard and

how can in the democratic countries learn the one plus one fundamentals, teachers slimy and scaly with tentacles growing out of its head. what happens is the pupils in that class turn for help to the big stupid bully at the back of the classroom. that is donald trump. >> our look at satirist p.j. o'rourke's program concludes with a discussion of recent book "none of my business: p.j. explains money, banking, debt, equity, assets, liabilities, and why he's not rich and neither are you" which looks at the history of currency and his thoughts on finance. >> one reason the concept of money violates common sense is governments do so many nonsensical things with that money. another reason money violates common sense is we don't have to use real commodities as money. we can use written promises to

deliver those commodities, paper money. this is fiduciary money from the latin word fiduciary meaning to trust and to not be too quick, the only president we had that even possessed some libertarian inclinations, paper money has a libertarian origin, it is a free market invention at least in europe. paper money was involved privately with bills of exchange traded among italian merchants and receipts given by goldsmith to whom precious metals have been entrusted for safekeeping. it did not take long for political authorities to steal the idea. government fiduciary money, printed in sweden. in copper plates, a large

fortune was a large fortune and in 1656 the stockholm began issuing paper notes and the bank issued too many notes and the swedish government went broke. in 1716, scotsman john law helped establish the bank royale issuing notes backed by the value of france's landholdings west of the mississippi, bank royal issued too many notes, the french government went broke. most extensive free modern experiment with fiduciary money happened in america in 1775, the second continental congress not only created paper money but passed a law about refusing to accept it. the continental congress issued too many notes and the pattern begins to emerge. all fiduciary money is backed by commodity even if factors are lying about the amount.

historically the most -- the major currencies of the world were based on goals based on the most major of those currencies which is the british pound. great economic growth, some people think we should go back on the gold standard. not all of them live in idaho. money should be worth something. gold seems as good as whatever. the value of gold is a social convention left over from the days when bright unblemished things were rare. gold may go out of fashion. generation may come along the regards goal is gross and immoral the way millennials regard feel. gold is a product. we may discover improved methods to get huge new amounts, this happened to the spanish when they conquered the new world, obtained tons of

gold, melted it down and send it to a mint. never occurred to the spanish that they were just creating more money, not creating more things to buy with it. 1600, prices in spain went up 400%. presented with vast wealth of america's oceans, fields, forests, spain took the gold, as if someone took the bank and took nothing but deposit slips so gold is not a perfectly rational basis for a currency but the real problem with fiduciary money from the government standpoint is not that it is irrational but is inconvenient. the currency that can be converted into a commodity limits the amount of currency that can be printed. the government has to have at least some of that commodity or the world makes a laughing stock of its bank notes.

with fiduciary money, governments lie about having precious metals to redeem their paper currency and governments do worse than lie, people holding fiduciary money can wake up the way they did on april 5th, 1933, when fdr signed the executive order 6102 banning the ownership of gold. people can wake up and find the redeeming paper currency for what the law says it is worth his against the law. of the government can lie and steal to support its currency why can't the government lie about and steal everything to do with its currency and that is exactly what all governments have done. instead of passing a law saying one dollar equals x amount of gold, our government passed a law saying one dollar equals one dollar. this is fiat money from the latin word of a binding edict, from the italian word for a

cheap and not very reliable car. fiat money is backed by nothing but faith that the government won't keep printing money until we are using it in place of something much more important such as toilet paper which is what things have come to in venezuela. it is not by any means a venezuelan boulevard. no intrinsic value involved in any fiat money. it is just a pronouncement of existence of his him from government central banks. trillions and trillions of dollars, euros, pounds, yen, they are singing we are here because we are here because we are here which was a popular tune in the trenches in world war i a properly enough since world war i was when fiat money came into general use. all of the money in the world today is fiat money. we've got it because the government says we've got to. the art money is supposed to be

worth something for i call the lousy parent reason. frustrated and inept government tells us like we frustrated and inept parents tell our children because i said so. it is -- is crypto currency the answer? it is one of those i'm glad you asked that question questions as politicians running for office always says what they mean is i have no idea what the answer is. as a libertarian i want a medium of exchange, a kind of money that adheres to libertarian principles. actually, money that adheres to just one libertarian principle would suffice as far as i'm concerned and this is the privacy principle. what i do that does not physically harm anyone else is none of anyone else's business. go. businesses could not deal with medical crypto currency would seem to be a private kind of money libertarians want.

it is private in the most important senses of privacy. first crypto currency is not public and therefore not subject to government public policy. the public policy with monies to issue as much as the government feels like issuing. government treats money like a stalker treats posting things on your facebook page was a couple clicks of the federal reserve keyboard and there's another creepy rent. the original rant didn't have much value and subsequent rantings are increasingly worthless but unfriending the government, very difficult to do. second, crypto currency encrypts transition the transactions. what you are buying and selling does not -- is not revealed to a nosy snoop and that now the snoop being once again the government. i'm a fairly law-abiding guy, i don't even cheat on my taxes any more than federally

mandated tax loopholes require me to do. i wouldn't use crypto currency for any criminal scheme -- maybe cuban cigars. but no matter how legal the purchases i make are, i don't like those private purchases being on the public record in sales receipts and credit card records available to who knows who, who knows what nosy snoop government agency and i don't like other people's purchases being on the public record either. someone buys a plastic inflatable anatomically correct many mouse all for intimate relations in the privacy of their home i don't want to know about it and i don't want the government to know about it for fear the epa may impose endangered plastic rodent regulations on all of us or some high-minded epa functionary will leak the information to peter causing

the inflatable now stall store to be vandalized when my car is parked nearby. i am more worried about government abusing its police powers than individuals abusing their purchasing powers so that is the case in favor of crypto currency. but to tell the truth i don't own any. in fact i have no use for crypto currency. bit coin is down this morning but has been hovering around $7,000, but if you want to buy, i have a banged up station wagon i got for my teenage kids to bang up some more and if you offer me one bit coin for that volvo station wagon i would tell you to bite me because i am ignorant, i'm confused by the mathematical intricacies used by computer program block chains that underlie crypto currencies.

i am confused about a lot of things. i'm confused by women, didn't stop me from marrying one. i fly on airplanes all the time with no idea why they take off or how they land but i am particularly confused by the internet. i look at the internet and i think whose bright idea was it to make sure every idiot in the world is in touch with every other idiot. also as far as i can tell the internet is an enormous hacking industry serviced by a small global internet connected computer network and i fear that somehow crypto currency is the invention of outliners with with an iced slide rules in the high school evil math club. right now some a-list pear-shaped 15-year-old wearing a nosy pajamas is in his bedroom with the floor covered in empty snickers rappers logging on to make himself a billionaire on the darknet. i hope walgreens accepts crypto

currency in payment for acne treatment. money is the root of libertarianism but anyone confused by money is insane. the extra confusions of crypto currency probably are not the antipsychotic medication that is needed. we worry about money, we worry about our medium of exchange, we worry that a medium of exchange collapses our society will collapse so a number of years ago i thought about this and maybe the way to understand that worry about society collapsing is to go someplace where society has collapsed already. in 1992 i went to somalia to cover the us led military mission there to save somalia from famine, actually from total anarchy. let me pause for a moment and talk about the nra because we libertarians are often confused with or accused of being

anarchists and this isn't true. libertarians believe in social structure. we believe in the social structure that protects individual liberty uphold individual dignity and ensures individual responsibility. this is very different from believing and no social structure at all. somalia had no social structure at all. somalia was true anarchy. a vicious dictatorship had been overflown, the somali separately their independence by shooting each other. fighting broke out everywhere and it wasn't traditional african tribal warfare because the somalis all belong to the same tribe but that tribe has 6 clans. the 6 clans have hundreds of sub clans and each sub clan is divided into infinite murderous feuds. somalis fought each other with rifles, mortars, cannons and by the look of mogadishu wads of filth. not one stone stood upon

another. everything was built of concrete in the concrete had been blasted back into piles, there was no water or electricity. at my the only illumination was from tracer bullets, every bush had been snatched for firewood, sewage welled up in the pavement, mounds of sand blue through the streets, rubbish was dumped the top wreckage and goats grazed, everything guns can accomplish had been achieved in mogadishu. it wasn't simply that, i signed on as a radio reporter and abc managed to find a wall mansion more or less intact and they hired a 40 man army of somali mercenaries to protect this

compound, 20 some of us reporters, camera crews, producers were houseinthis while our security is both somali mercenaries like to be called, security camp in the courtyard. it was impossible for us to go outside this compound without a truck full of this security and even with our gunmen along there were always people massing up to bag, and tugged at wallet, no foreigner could make a move without attracting a hornets nest, demanding, grasping, waving ak-47 assault rifles, pushed among the crowd, roasted, vented pickup trucks with gun mounts welded into their beds sputtering around on predatory errands. another abc reporter had been in somalia for six months, to

the market in mogadishu. i said sure, let's see if there was a market, and if there was a market what were the somalis buying and selling? i learned an important lesson about medium of exchange in that market. i learned there will always be a medium of exchange. the currency may not be what you expect but no matter how totally society collapses there will be a form of currency. we are traveling with an armed somali driver and this requisite truck full of armed security but even so when we get down to the market my friend leon gets out of the car and pulled out a 9 millimeter pistol and waves it over his

head in a dramatic gesture and wraps a bullet into the chamber and i am looking at him and he looks at me and grinning like a maniac says i call it the visa card of the future. >> if you missed any of these author programs with satirist p.j. o'rourke or you want to watch them in their entirety you can visit our website, booktv.org. access our archives by using the search box at the top of the page and search p.j. o'rourke. this memorial day weekend on booktv, today, at 3:25 eastern, best-selling author james patterson talks about efforts to impact bookstores impacted by the coronavirus in his latest book the house of kennedy. on sunday at 4:00 pm eastern, foundation for liberty of american greatness out of nick

adams on his book trump and churchill, defenders of western civilization. at 4:30 eastern, time magazine political correspondent molly ball talks about her latest book pelosi which looks at the career of speaker of the house of representatives nancy pelosi. at 9:00 pm on afterwords facebook cofounder chris hughes talks about his book fair shot about his plan to reduce poverty and strength in the middle-class. monday at 8:30 p.m. eastern best-selling thriller writer david baldaci talked about his books on "in depth". watch booktv this memorial day weekend on c-span2. >> this memorial day weekend on american history tv on c-span 3. at 10:00 pm eastern on real america the 1967 film discover america, promoting tourism and domestic travel in the us.

>> saint augustine, florida, the oldest house in the oldest town of all the oldest towns. here too we find ancient stones of the old castillo to san marco, some banished forces from a banished time, centuries past, ponce deleon pushed on to seek a magic fountain of eternal youth. >> sunday on american artifacts we visit africa town, a national historic landmark neighborhood in mobile alabama. >> >> we want to negotiate with timothy mayor, whatever it takes to get us out of this. every friday when it came time to get paid, that money went for food, clothing and shelter, never had any discretionary money. this came to the resolve that they had to stay in this community, they didn't understand the language, the customs, but they made a way

out and brought their customs, their culture to this community and they said this is our africa town. >> this memorial day weekend on american history tv on c-span 3. .. >> here are some programs to watch out for. best selling author james patterson talks about his latest book on the kennedy family and his efforts to assist bookstores affected by the pandemic. time magazine national political correspondent molly ball on the life and career of nancy pelosi. nick adams, founder and president of the foundation for american liberty and greatness, offers his thoughts about the similarities between president trump and winston churchill. and on monday it's an extra 24 hours of booktv,