Posts By Author » John Stossel

Keeping Business Honest
23 May 2012 12:07 am

Instinctively, we look for people’s motives. We need to know whom we can trust and whom we can’t. We’re especially skeptical of business because we know business wants our money.
It took me too long to understand that business’s desire for profit is a good thing. To get our money, businesses — if they can’t look to the government for favors — need to give us what we want. Then they must make continuous improvements and do it better than the competition does.
That competition is enough to protect consumers. But that’s …

Making Life Fair
16 May 2012 12:08 am

When my wife was a liberal, she complained that libertarian reasoning is coldhearted. Since markets produce winners and losers — and many losers did nothing wrong — market competition is cruel. It must seem so. President Obama used the word “fair” in his last State of the Union address nine times.
We are imprinted to prefer a world that is “fair.” Our close relatives the chimpanzees freak out when one chimp gets more than his fair share, so zookeepers are careful about food portions. Chimps are hardwired to get angry when …

Creating a Risk-Free World
9 May 2012 12:07 am

A child leaving home alone for the first time takes a risk. So does the entrepreneur who opens a new business. I no more want government to prevent us from doing these things than I want it to keep us in padded cells.
Everyone has a different tolerance for risk. One person takes out a second mortgage to start a business. Another thinks that sounds nerve-racking, if not insane. Neither person is wrong. Government cannot know each person’s preferences, or odds of success.
Even if it did, what right does it have …

Keeping Nature Exactly as Is … Forever
2 May 2012 12:05 am

The human brain is torn between simple intuition and the more complex hard work of figuring out the unintended consequences of any policy. Who doesn’t like thinking about trees and greenery and happy animals? Who doesn’t want to see steps taken to protect those things, all else being equal? But all else is not equal. Civilization doesn’t work when central planners treat each tree as if its value is infinite.
Politicians specialize in convincing you that, with their help, you can have your cake and eat it, too. The idea of …

The Assault on Food
25 Apr 2012 12:06 am

Instinct tells us to fear poison. If our ancestors were not cautious about what they put in their mouths, they would not have survived long enough to produce us.
Unfortunately, a side effect of that cautious impulse is that whenever someone claims that some chemical — or food ingredient, like fat — is a menace, we are primed to believe it. That makes it easy for government to leap in and play the role of protector.
But for every study that says X is bad for you, another study disagrees. How is …

The Economy Needs No Conductor
18 Apr 2012 12:07 am

We spend too much time waiting for orders — and money — from Washington.
The collapse of the housing bubble gave politicians a license to do what they wanted to do all along: spend. The usual checks on extravagance, weak as they are, were washed away. Budgets? We’ll worry about that later. Inflation? We’ll worry about that later.
As I point out in my brand new book, “No, We Can’t: Why Government Fails — and Individuals Succeed,” a true free market doesn’t require much. It’s not like an orchestra in need of …

Can Government Do Anything Well?
11 Apr 2012 12:06 am

I’m suspicious of superstitions, like astrology or the belief that “green jobs will fix the environment and the economy.” I understand the appeal of such beliefs. People crave simple answers and want to believe that some higher power determines our fates.
The most socially destructive superstition of all is the intuitively appealing belief that problems are best solved by government.
Opinion polls suggest that Americans are dissatisfied with government. Yet whenever another crisis hits, the natural human instinct is to say, “Why doesn’t the government do something?”
And politicians appear to be problem-solvers. …

Let’s Give the Fed Some Competition
5 Apr 2012 12:01 am

Pssst. Want to buy some Stossels? They’re my own currency with my face on them.
Why should you trust them?
Because I promise to redeem them for gold. And I’m reliable. I have money in the bank and a job that brings in more than I spend.
By contrast, the politicians who back American currency run an unsustainable deficit.
The Federal Reserve prints so much money that since it opened its doors in 1914, the dollar has lost more than 90 percent of its value.
OK, I won’t really sell Stossels. Americans get jailed for …

Let’s Give the Fed Some Competition
4 Apr 2012 12:06 am

Job Killers
28 Mar 2012 12:07 am

Politicians say they “create jobs.” In fact, only the private sector generates the information needed to create real, productive jobs.
Since this current post-recession job recovery is the slowest in 80 years, you’d think that even know-it-all politicians would want to sweep away the labyrinth of government regulations that hinders job creation. Successful job creators like Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Staples founder Tom Stemberg tell me there are so many new rules and taxes today that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for them to create the thousands …

What Is Fair?
21 Mar 2012 12:06 am

President Obama says he want to make society more fair. Advocates of big government believe fairness means taking from rich people and giving to others: poor people; or people who do things politicians approve of, like making “green” energy equipment (Solyndra); or old people (even rich ones) through Social Security and Medicare.
The idea that government can “make life fair” is intuitively appealing to people — at least until they think about it. I’ll try to help.
Obama says fairness requires higher taxes, but as The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore asks, …

Complex Societies Need Simple Laws
14 Mar 2012 12:07 am

“If you have 10,000 regulations,” Winston Churchill said, “you destroy all respect for law.”
He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That’s what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can’t keep up. Criminal lawyers call the rules “incomprehensible.” They are. They are also “uncountable.” Congress has created so many criminal offenses that the American Bar Association says it would …

Vulture Capitalism
7 Mar 2012 12:06 am

Now that Mitt Romney is likely to be the Republican nominee, we can expect new attacks on his “vulture capitalism.” That’s how Rick Perry characterized his private equity work. Newt Gingrich’s supporters ran an ad about Romney’s firm, Bain Capital, that said, “Their greed was only matched by their willingness to do anything to make millions in profits.”
Give me a break.
“Greed” means you want more for yourself. Fine. If you obtain it legally, without force or privilege — say, by buying a business and making it more efficient, or shifting …

Prohibition
29 Feb 2012 12:07 am

Unlike Bill Clinton, President Obama admits he inhaled!. “Frequently,” he said. “That was the point.”
People laugh when politicians talk about their drug use. The audience laughed during a 2003 CNN Democratic presidential primary debate when John Kerry, John Edwards and Howard Dean admitted smoking weed.
Yet those same politicians oversee a cruel system that now stages SWAT raids on people’s homes more than 100 times a day. People die in these raids — some weren’t even the intended targets of the police.
Neill Franklin once led such raids. The 33-year Maryland police …

I Tried to Open a Lemonade Stand
24 Feb 2012 12:01 am

Want to open a business in America? It isn’t easy.
In Midway, Ga., a 14-year-old girl and her 10-year-old sister sold lemonade from their front yard. Two police officers bought some. But the next day, different officers ordered them to close their stand.
Their father went to city hall to try to find out why. The clerk laughed and said she didn’t know. Eventually, Police Chief Kelly Morningstar explained, “We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade and of what the lemonade was made with.”
Give me …

Politicians Fiddle While Fiscal Crisis Looms
22 Feb 2012 12:06 am

Imagine this family budget:
Last year, you earned $24,700. But you spent $37,900, incurring $13,300 in debt, and you were already $153,500 in debt.
So you say, “I promise I’ll spend $300 less this year!”
Anyone can see that your cutback is pathetic and that you need to spend much less.
Yet if you add eight zeroes, that’s America’s budget.
The president says again that he will cut spending — but don’t be fooled. He wants to spend more on some items, those he euphemistically calls “invest(ment) in the things that will help grow our economy.” (As …

Never Trust Government Numbers
15 Feb 2012 12:06 am

President Obama said in his State of the Union speech, “We’ve already agreed to more than $2 trillion in cuts and savings.”
That was reassuring.
The new budget he released this week promises $4 trillion in “deficit reduction” — about half in tax increases and half in spending cuts. But like most politicians, Obama misleads.
Cato Institute economist Dan Mitchell cut through the fog to get at the truth of the $2 trillion “cut.”
“We have a budget of, what, almost $4 trillion? So if we’re doing $2 trillion of cuts,” Mitchell said, “we’re …

Government Can’t Make Us Happy
8 Feb 2012 12:06 am

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called the pursuit of happiness an unalienable right. This was a radical idea. For most of history, most people didn’t think much about pursuing happiness. They were too busy just trying to survive.
Then came the liberal revolution based on the idea of individual freedom. Only then did they start thinking that happiness might be possible on earth.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the right to pursue happiness has been perverted into a government-backed entitlement to happiness.
British Prime Minister David Cameron says, “There’s more to …

Policing the World
1 Feb 2012 12:07 am

With an election approaching and at least some Americans upset about irresponsible spending, the president has finally expressed a political interest in cutting something. He says the Pentagon will spend “only” $525 billion next year. That’s slightly less than the current $531 billion.
A cut is good, but this will barely dent the deficit. We could save much more if America assumed a military policy designed for defense rather than policing the world.
Presidential candidate Ron Paul gets criticized for advocating that. Paul’s opponents, including many of my colleagues, complain about his …

The Real State of the Union
25 Jan 2012 12:06 am

Has Barack Obama learned nothing in three years? Last night, during his State of the Union address, he promised “a blueprint for an economy.” But economies are crushed by blueprints. An economy is really nothing more than people participating in an unfathomably complex spontaneous network of exchanges aimed at improving their material circumstances. It can’t even be diagrammed, much less planned. And any attempt at it will come to grief.
Politicians like Obama believe they are the best judges of how we should conduct our lives. Of course a word like …

Who Is Brett Kimberlin?

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