Give Me a Break!
Confiscating Your Property
In America, we’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. Life, liberty, and property can’t be taken from you unless you’re convicted of a crime. Your life and liberty may still be safe, but have you ever gone to a government surplus auction? Consumer reporters like me tell people, correctly, that they are great places [...]
25Aug2010 | John Stossel | 6 comments | ContinuedPoliticians Smother Cities
I like my hometown, but I must admit that New York has problems: high taxes, noise, traffic. Forbes magazine ranks my city the 16th most miserable in America. Ouch! Of course, that makes me wonder: What’s America’s most miserable city? Cleveland, says Forbes. People call it “the Mistake by the Lake.” Cleveland, once America’s sixth-largest [...]
29Jun2010 | John Stossel | 6 comments | ContinuedThe Right to Work
The people of Louisiana must sleep soundly knowing that their state protects them from . . . unlicensed florists. That’s right. In Louisiana, you can’t sell flower arrangements unless you have permission from the government. How do you get permission? You must pass a test graded by a board of florists who already have licenses. [...]
20May2010 | John Stossel | 16 comments | ContinuedBig 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 | 5 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-
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