Archive for John Stossel
John Stossel is the host of Stossel on Fox Business and the author of Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel--Why Everything You Know is Wrong, now in paperback. Copyright 2010 by JFS Productions, Inc. Distributed by Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Big Government’s Cronies
Many window-making companies struggle because of the recession’s effect on home building. But one little window company, Serious Materials, is “booming,” says Fortune. “On a roll,” according to Inc. magazine, which put Serious’s CEO on its cover, with a story titled: “How to Build a Great Company.” The Minnesota Freedom Foundation tells me that this [...]
20Apr2010 | John Stossel | 1 comment | ContinuedLet’s Take the “Crony” Out of “Crony Capitalism”
When Judge Richard Posner, the prolific conservative intellectual, released his book A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent Into Depression last year, you might have thought the final verdict was in: Capitalism caused the economic downturn and high unemployment. That this verdict was pronounced by someone like Posner, who is associated [...]
24Mar2010 | John Stossel | 4 comments | ContinuedStop Insuring Mortgages
The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) announced last December that it wants tougher rules on mortgage lenders. Maybe FHA got spooked by a New York Times story in November titled “Easy Loans to Wealthier Areas,” which said: “In its efforts to prop up a shattered housing market, the government is greatly extending its traditional support of [...]
24Feb2010 | John Stossel | 4 comments | ContinuedTransfer Machine
“The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul,” George Bernard Shaw once said. For a socialist Shaw demonstrated good sense with that quotation. Unfortunately, America has become a laboratory in which his hypothesis is being tested. The theory of government I was taught says that government provides [...]
1Jan2010 | John Stossel | 7 comments | ContinuedBig Business Goes Big for Health Care Reform
“What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand,” Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times a few months ago. That manipulation should disturb us. But contrary to Rich, it is not the work of “corporatists” who have [...]
18Nov2009 | John Stossel | 5 comments | ContinuedCompetition
Give Me a Break! Competition by John Stossel John Stossel is the hosts of Stossel on Fox Business and the author of Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel—Why Everything You Know is Wrong. Copyright 2009 by JFS Productions, Inc. Distributed by Creators Syndicate, Inc. “Choice, competition, reducing costs—those are the things that [...]
23Oct2009 | John Stossel | 1 comment | ContinuedArrogance
It’s crazy for a group of mere mortals to try to design 15 percent of the U.S. economy. It’s even crazier to do it in a few months. Yet that is what some members of Congress presumed to do. They intended, as the New York Times put it, “to reinvent the nation’s health care system.” [...]
23Sep2009 | John Stossel | 17 comments | ContinuedCompetition Would Save Medicine, Too
Competition so regularly brings us better stuff—cars, phones, shoes, medicine—that we’ve come to expect it. We complain on the rare occasion the supermarket doesn’t carry a particular ice-cream flavor. We just assume the store will have 30,000 items, that it will be open 24/7, and that the food will be fresh and cheap. I take [...]
19Aug2009 | John Stossel | 11 comments | ContinuedThe Fatal Conceit
The politicians are confident that they can wisely spend trillions of your dollars. The arrogance of the political class is stunning.
17Jun2009 | John Stossel | 10 comments | ContinuedReal Jobs Create Wealth
If the government’s projects were truly worthwhile, they would be undertaken by private efforts, and in their quest for profits, entrepreneurs would handle them more efficiently.
Remember this when President Obama begins to boast about how successful his stimulus plan is.
21May2009 | John Stossel | 11 comments | ContinuedMaking a Bad Bill Worse
How do you make a dreadfully bad piece of legislation—the nearly $800-billion so-called “stimulus” bill—worse? Simple: Add protectionism. The “Buy American” provision of the stimulus bill, which mandates the use of domestic iron, steel, and manufactured goods even if imports are cheaper, makes our trading partners nervous. That created a problem for President Obama: “I [...]
24Apr2009 | John Stossel | 5 comments | ContinuedMadoff is a Piker
Bernard Madoff, who stands accused of bilking sophisticated investors out of $50 billion, reportedly told two of his executives that his business was “a giant Ponzi scheme.” Perpetrators of Ponzi schemes lead clients to believe their money is invested and that their profits are the fruits of the money manager’s savvy. But in fact the [...]
1Apr2009 | John Stossel | 2 comments | ContinuedGovernment Sets Us Up for the Next Bust
If an athlete injures himself and suffers great pain, we recognize the shortsightedness of giving him painkillers to keep him going. The pain might be masked, but at the risk of greater injury later. That’s a good analogy for the inflationary policies now pursued by Washington. These policies may temporarily “stimulate the economy,” but they [...]
2Mar2009 | John Stossel | 32 comments | ContinuedWhat Happened to Market Discipline?
During the late presidential campaign Barack Obama said, “[Today’s economic problems are] a stark reminder of the failures of . . . an economic philosophy that sees any regulation at all as unwise and unnecessary.” What? Does that mean that until last fall the Bush administration embraced the free market? Nonsense. Governments at all levels [...]
20Jan2009 | John Stossel | 3 comments | Continued
Tear Down the Stop Signs!
Day after day in Warren, Michigan, people wait in a long line to pay traffic fines. Many are there because police say they didn’t come to a full stop at a stop sign. Often the policeman saying that is Officer David Kanapsky. On a “20/20” segment earlier this year viewers heard a motorist in court [...]
1Dec2008 | John Stossel | 5 comments | ContinuedBless the Speculators
“I believe there needs to be a thorough and complete investigation of speculators to find out whether speculation has been going on and, if so, how much it has affected the price of a barrel of oil. There’s a lot of things out there that need a lot more transparency and, consequently, oversight.” Those are [...]
1Nov2008 | John Stossel | 1 comment | ContinuedLegalize All Drugs
Reading the New York Post‘s popular Page Six gossip page recently, I was surprised to find a picture of me, followed by the lines: “ABC’S John Stossel wants the government to stop interfering with your right to get high. The crowd went silent at his call to legalize hard drugs.” I had attended a Marijuana [...]
1Oct2008 | John Stossel | 6 comments | Continued-
The Latest
Contraception: Insuring the Uninsurable
Update below. Controversy rages over the Obama administration’s mandate that all employers – including... Read More
The Snow Plowers’ Petition
The following might have happened in a small college town in upstate New York… In a cold and snowy... Read More
Super Bowl versus Education?
In the spirit of Super Bowl weekend I’d like to deconstruct a Facebook status update that a friend... Read More
Capitalism, Corporatism, and the Freed Market
When a front-running presidential contender tells the country that thanks to Barack Obama, “[w]e are... Read More
Creating Jobs versus Creating Value
Picking on New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is one of the largest participation sports on the Internet.... Read More
