like folks who are arguing for more government all the time, all the arguments seem to be very tangible and immediate and urgent. John Stossel: They do, and I’m glad you picked up on that from No, They Can’t , that when something happens, there’s innate human tendency to say, “There ought to be a law to fix that.” And it’s hard to fight, and it’s harder to see the unintended consequences which may come out over 20 years. And so, the media focus on the immediate solution stuff. And the media is a big part of the problem... And it’s not all the reporters’ fault. One of the big developments over my 50 years of reporting, when I graduated there was the Vietnam War, and the media covered that quite well. And then you look at the big stories of the year, and it’s amazing how many of them are “nothing burgers.” I mean, the media is hysterical about the Ebola epidemic, and even COVID may turn out to be little. But the stuff that really changed our lives, the invention of the cell phone, the computer chip, Facebook, Google, there was no coverage... Because there was no single place it was happening. When the mayor holds a news conference, you can go and you can cover it. But when entrepreneurs all over the world are inventing something, we don’t have the resources to cover it, and even if we did, we wouldn’t know where to go to cover the stuff that happens slowly. Changing attitudes about gays, the women’s movement... We can cover the march, but you can’t cover all the subtle differences in people’s opinions that happen slowly over time. But that’s really the big stuff.
Dan Ferris: Tell me some more about the Stossel in the Classroom program. John Stossel: It started because I would get letters at ABC from teachers, “Oh, I wish I had taped that. That’s such a good explanation of this economic principle, and I would’ve loved to have shown it to my students. Can I buy it?” and ABC was selling them for $95. And so me being a libertarian, I formed a nonprofit that started offering them to teachers for less. And then we discovered that teachers don’t buy anything on their own, and so we raised more money and started offering them for free.
“” 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 we tried to go through the big teachers’ conferences and the teachers’ unions just killed us, they wouldn’t even allow us to have a booth in many places. But through mail-order and word-of-mouth, word spread among teachers, and over 15 years, we gradually built up to a list of about 120,000 teachers who liked the videos and would use them in class. Then we added teaching kits for them, and the state standards kept increasing, we added instructions on how they would meet your state standards. And now, we have these 100,000-plus teachers who, every year, play some of the videos in class and have discussions. Now, I don’t know what the
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