A Conversation With John Stossel
They can count the COVID deaths, but how many people die because the economy goes down and people are depressed? depressed? My first TV special for ABC, Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death? , pointed out that there’s good research that the biggest extender or shortener of lives is wealth. And poor people drive older cars with older tires, and they can’t afford the same good health care. In Bangladesh, floods kill thousands of people... In America, except for Katrina, floods don’t kill anybody, because we have cars with which to drive away, and radios to hear about the floods, and dikes to divert the water. Wealthier is healthier. So when they shut the economy down, they kill people, too. Now, can we measure that? Are they killing more than they’re saving? I don’t know, but I wish the hysterical media would talk about it. Dan Ferris: You know, on the one hand, we seem obsessed with kind John Stossel: Yes, of course. And this is a tough one for libertarians, because there is a role for government, and an epidemic and keeping an epidemic under control so that hospitals aren’t overwhelmed is almost certainly a job that government should try to do. And as always, they make mistakes, and in this case, they focused on the lives they might save by reducing the contagion by ordering people indoors. It’s the seen versus the unseen... They can count the COVID deaths, but how many people die because the economy goes down and people are
of babyproofing the entire world in response to the pandemic. And then on the other hand, we have wound up with violence in the streets and protests in 350 cities by one report. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m just making up a correlation, but I feel like in a society where you clamp down this hard to try to make things safe, you upset the balance and you’re really making things a lot more dangerous. John Stossel: You brought up seat belts earlier. Now, that’s an example of making things less safe, somewhat less safe, by trying to make them more safe. In that once you require seat belts – first of all, seat belts would’ve happened anyway – they were already coming before they were made mandatory. But when people wear seat belts, we drive faster. There’s something called the Peltzman Effect, after the University of Chicago economist who proposed it… He said the best safety device, instead of a seat belt, would be to have a spike aimed at the driver, mounted on the steering wheel, because that would make you drive much more carefully. We are more reckless with seat belts. On the other hand, seat belts clearly do save lives, because cars are really dangerous, and the seat belts do make a difference there. So that’s one Nanny State intrusion that almost certainly has saved lives. But as they continue to add more, they probably do cost lives. Because they make us poorer, and wealthier is healthier, and also because they make us just less self-aware. We trust that, “Oh, everything must be safe, because there must be regulation for this,” so, we don’t check. But are these riots happening because the economy is
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July 2020
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