Weekly Standard
P. J. O’Rourke

I lived in Washington from 1988 to 2008, and I return frequently—six or eight times a year to see friends and doctors (to the extent there’s a difference at my age) and to eat oysters and prime rib and drink whiskey at the Palm (sending me back to the doctors). But when I was in town for a few days last month I realized that I have been paying little or no attention to the city itself.

Paying little or no attention to Washington suits my classical liberal ideas. And—as the campaign slogan went for one Washington denizen who was best ignored—“Now More Than Ever.” But I am nonetheless embarrassed by how unobservant I’ve been.

I knew the city had changed, but I’d successfully ignored this until I went to stay with friends in a neighborhood where, in 1988, I would not have sent my worst enemy to run a daytime errand. (I lie. I would have gladly dispatched Noam Chomsky to the open-air drug market that was Lincoln Park 30 years ago, to get himself some crack to clarify his thinking.)

I was flabbergasted even looking out the taxi window on my way to “Southeast beyond 8th Street”—once a region of the District as remote from my quotidian life as Helmand Province.

From whence came the balconied canyons of apartment buildings around the Washington Navy Yard and Nationals Park? Whither went the Anacostia of yore? Who lives in all these shiny new places? And why?

The resplendent growth and glittering wealth of modern Washington would baffle a free-market economist. The city is not founded, as great cities are, on a rock, a river, or a road. The “Landfill of L’Enfant” is not placed in a defensible position. The storm sewer Potomac is a river by courtesy title only. And Washington doesn’t stand astride a great trade route. Rather, it squats athwart one, blocking with traffic jams the commerce of I-95.

Washington is no port or transportation axis or major marketplace for anything but egos. It is the business center of no business, the manufacturing hub of making nothing and spending all, incubator of no innovation except in fibs, and core of international banking only in the sense of a Federal Reserve financed by air.


Hog caller for the World,

Fool maker, Stacker of Decks,

Player with Logrolling and the

Nation’s man-handler;

Whiny, feckless, appalling,

City of the Sharp Elbows.

Yet in fact, Washington’s growth and wealth are all too easily explained. People are flocking to the seat of government power. One would say “dogs returning to their vomit” except that’s too hard on dogs. Too hard on people, also. They come to Washington because they have no choice—diligent working breeds compelled to eat their regurgitated tax dollars.

The federal government has captured the economy of the United States, nationalizing and centralizing our labor and means of production to an extent not seen in avowedly Communist countries such as China and Vietnam.

The federal government has done this not with the iron grid of Marxist theory but with the silken threads of entitlement spending, the caress of funding, the enticement of subsidy, and the seduction of easy monetary policy.

All these baits and lures are placed in Washington at the crux of a spider web of regulatory and legislative interference in the marketplace. If we want something—anything—we must go to Washington and beg it from the arachnids in charge.

Hence the gentrification of the once half-derelict quarters of the District, with courtiers now living in splendor where slum-dwellers would not live in squalor.

Who is this new gentry? Are they squires with vast land holdings? (Sort of. The federal government owns 640 million acres of land, though not put to very productive use.) Are they an intellectual elite? Cue laughter. A military aristocracy? The knights in camouflaged armor are in aforementioned Helmand Province, not the Pentagon. The new gentry may be robbers but they are hardly baronial.

Actually, they aren’t even new. The gentry are, as they always were, just “Beltway insiders.” The difference is that now they are much more numerous, and they make much more money because as the size of government benefits has grown, so has the labor of extracting them.

Meanwhile, what happened to the poor people? It was an apposite verse in old Washington, Matthew 26:11, “For ye have the poor always with you.” There they were a couple hundred yards from the Capitol dome. And the verse was (or should have been) salutary. The weight of governance falls heaviest on the poor. Government could look around itself and see at close range what good its legislation and regulation and the toadying acolytes thereof had done for the poor. None. But that burden of biblical instruction has been lifted from the shoulders of governance. Nowadays Matthew 26:11 reads, “For ye have the poor always somewhere out in Prince George’s County.”

It’s a rich man’s city now. I accept that as inevitable under the force majeure circumstances. But something besides wealth and power was bothering me as I walked around safe, clean, and prosperous Capitol Hill. The coffee shops with their misplaced living room furniture, free WiFi, and exorbitant cups of joe admixed with ­untoward ingredients. The restaurants serving dishes that no one has heard of from countries where no one has been. The neck-bearded young men with sleeves of tats and the pierce-faced young women with heads shaved in some places and in other places not.

When governance becomes opulent, we can perhaps survive it. When governance becomes omnipotent we can perhaps endure it. But when governance becomes hip . . . All is lost.

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I have long admired Peej’s way with words.

He's a Toledo boy.

And he is absolutely right.

This is, really, no great surprise. Remember the explosion of construction that started with the Obama administration? This is the result.

The more interesting question is whether this kind of density of lobbyists, suburban white people on a mission and would-be technocrats is the new normal or a portion of the swamp that will wind up being left high, dry and empty.

Here's to cheap condos in Anacostia!

It cannot be laid at the feet of Obama. He was merely the latest of many. Not even as notable as the worst offenders.

It goes back to the Great Depression and the passing of Coolidge-style small government.

O'Rourke is always amusing. Thanks for the share.