A Conversation With John Stossel
Also, when you have more law, you have more crime. And you’ve got to have some law... It’s the job of the state and the police to keep us safe, but the drug laws and – there’s a website that lists the insane federal laws, the bar association tried to count them, and they couldn’t even count them. And so all of us who are busy doing things, building something, we probably are breaking some laws, and if the cops wanted to get us, they could. But the problem is that nobody goes to work at the EPA, unless you’re an environmental zealot who wants to pass more rules. No group of schoolkids goes to the state house to meet their legislators and asks, “What laws have you repealed?” They all ask, “What laws have you passed?” So, Thomas Jefferson said it’s the nature of things for government to grow and liberty to yield, and that happens. And that gives us
more laws and more lawbreaking, higher jail costs, more problems. Dan Ferris: Well, if you’re trying to fill me with hope for the future, John, I’m afraid you’re not doing a good job of it right now. John Stossel: Yeah, sorry about that. On the other hand, life… it gets better. In spite of all these bad things going on, the animal spirits of the economy have grown as fast as the suffocating growth of government, and that plus innovation means most people’s lives get better. And, heck, billions of people have been lifted out of the mud and misery of terrible poverty over the past 30 years because of capitalism. So, let’s not forget that good news. Dan Ferris: But John, isn’t capitalism evil? Doesn’t it exploit people? Isn’t that the problem today, is that all these businesspeople get bailed out, and poor people are still poor? John Stossel: It’s a problem when businesspeople get bailed out. Real capitalism is you don’t get bailed out – you’re free to fail. So that’s crony capitalism and that’s not good, but I just am dismayed listening to my educated liberal friends argue that capitalism is the problem... It’s not. Dan Ferris: I think one of the problems that libertarians have is that – and I saw this mentioned in your book No, They Can’t – in the news, they always wanted you to cover something that was happening right then, with a lot of urgency to it. But you said you wanted to cover things that played out over a longer period of time. And in a somewhat similar vein, it seems
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July 2020
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