John Stossel Quotes:

The people who tried government regulation have lives which are miserable.

Topics: Government, People, Regulation, Government Regulation

David Boaz has been my guide to the history, economics, and politics of freedom for years.

Topics: Years, Economics, Guides

What would you think of a person who earned $24,000 a year but spent $35,000? Suppose on top of that, he was already $170,000 in debt. You'd tell him to get his act together - stop spending so much or he'd destroy his family, impoverish his kids and wreck their future. Of course, no individual could live so irresponsibly for long. But tack on eight more zeroes to that budget and you have the checkbook for our out-of-control, big-spending federal government.

Topics: Kids, Thinking, Years, Politics And Economics

Happiness comes when we test our skills towards some meaningful purpose.

Topics: Happiness, Meaningful, Inspiration

The political class can't imagine a decentralized world where good things happen...without them. But in the real world, that's exactly how good things happen, and how jobs are created. When government sets simple rules that everyone understands and then gets out of the way, free people create jobs.

Topics: Jobs, Real, Simple

Give me safety, or give me death.

Topics: Safety, Giving

What happened under communism - and increasingly, is happening in America, as Joseph Sobran put it: 'Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer.'

Topics: Mean, Compassion, Wanting Someone, Transfers

I never wanted to be an anchor for 25 years, and suddenly I wanted to be one.

Topics: Years, Anchors, Wanted

I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to see the folly of most government intervention. It was probably 15 years before I really woke up to the fact that almost everything government attempts to do, it makes worse.

source: - "John Stossel: Not Afraid to Tell the Truth". Ed Sigall, NewsMax, June 3, 2006.

Topics: Government, Years, Long, Government Intervention

Good government has to mean less government.

Topics: Mean, Government

Life is fairer when individuals are free to make their own decisions

source: - John Stossel (2012). “No, They Can't: Why Government Fails-But Individuals Succeed”, p.52, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Decision, Life Is, Individual

When workers can get and equal return for less effort, workers make less effort

Topics: Effort, Return, Equal

The smaller the government, the less the need to manipulate politicians.

Topics: Government, Needs, Politician

Companies don't get rich hurting their customers.

Topics: Hurt, Rich, Get Rich

Why, in our 'free' country, do Americans meekly stand aside and let the state limit our choices, even when we are dying?

Topics: Country, Choices, Dying

As a free person, I ought to be allowed if I'm dying to take something.

Topics: Dying, Persons

I'm an American. I'm for prosperity. I've discovered, from 40 years of reporting, that what creates prosperity is limited government.

Topics: Government, Years, Prosperity

I was ashamed for people to see me struggle.

Topics: Struggle, People, Ashamed

I saw how the regulation I called for made things worse, didn't help consumers and simple competition was better. And I started praising business and occasionally criticizing regulation.

Topics: Simple, Competition, Regulation

The happiest stutterers, I learned, are those who are willing to stutter in front of others.

Topics: Willing

I was bullied as a kid, and I got a job on television. And I had a camera. And so I wanted to go after those business bullies. And I just have been following that instinct.

Topics: Jobs, Kids, Bully

People acting in their own self-interest is the fuel for all the discovery, innovation, and prosperity that powers the world.

Topics: Discovery, Self, People

Patrick Henry did not say, 'Give me absolutely safety or give me death.' America is supposed to be about freedom.

Topics: America, Safety, Giving

You can either invade a country or leave them alone and trade with them. When goods cross borders, armies don't.

source: - "Is Ron Paul Hurting the Libertarian Movement?". "The O'Reilly Factor", www.foxnews.com. October 4, 2011.

Topics: Country, Army, Borders

The politicians should not tell the people to shut up.

Topics: People, Political, Shut Up

Competition leads both drug companies and private regulators to be trustworthy. If they are not trustworthy, they die.

Topics: Drug, Competition, Trustworthy, Drug Companies, Trust Worthy

I had to watch government fail for 25 years doing consumer reporting before I really saw it because intuitively, the reaction is problem, bring government and government will make it better.

Topics: Government, Years, Watches

Central authority is bad. The bias should be for freedom. And without a central authority, there are lots of little authorities, and we learn which ones to trust.

Topics: Littles, Authority, Should

All our rights are gradually eroded as government gets bigger.

Topics: Rights, Government, Bigger, Anti Government

A thousand restaurants close every month. They re-open, and that's good for America. Nobody's rescuing them. They employ people, too. If we let them go bankrupt, the factories don't go away, the creative people don't go away. They get employed more productively by others.

Topics: America, People, Creative

[T]he only way to shrink the trade deficit is for the government to prohibit us from buying whatever we want.

Topics: Government, Balance, Want

I'm a libertarian. It's a terrible word.

Topics: Libertarian, Terrible

We have all kinds of government compensation systems that are much more efficient than the lawyers.

Topics: Government, Lawyer, Kind

What I've learned in 40 years of consumer reporting is that the market is imperfect, and some people get ripped off.

Topics: Years, People, Imperfect

The people who have the biggest passion for restricting other people's behavior are the very people we should worry about most. Unfortunately, they keep running for office.

Topics: Running, Passion, People, Running For Office

The people who run the international tests told us, "the biggest predictor of student success is choice." Nations that "attach the money to the kids" and thereby allow parents to choose between different public and private schools have higher test scores. This should be no surprise; competition makes us better.

Topics: Running, School, Kids, Test Scores, Private School

I started out by viewing the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market.

Topics: Jobs, Believe, Government

Take away the government's monopoly, and private groups will do it better.

Topics: Government, Groups, Monopoly

..the real world's all we've got. Believers in the supernatural claim to have special wisdom about the world. But real wisdom means knowing truth from falsehood, knowing the difference between evidence and wishful thinking. Yes, the real world is mysterious and sometimes frightening. But would the supernatural make it better? The real world has beauty, poetry, love and the joy of honest discovery. Isn't that enough?

Topics: Real, Mean, Thinking, Beauty Poetry, Real Wisdom

Isn't allowing people a choice what America is all about?

Topics: America, People, Choices

I like taking the subway to work.

Topics: Subway

I was a closet stutterer.

Topics: Closets

No transaction happens unless it is voluntary. It only happens if both of you think you win.

Topics: Winning, Thinking, Transactions

When entrepreneurs are free to compete, they grow the pie so that everyone's share gets larger.

Topics: Pie, Entrepreneur, Share

Private businesses ought to get to discriminate.

Living with the liberals, you get to hear their arguments, fight with them all the time. Keeps me alert.

Topics: Fighting, Argument

There's no business that's too small for government to torture

Topics: Government, Politics, Torture

Asking someone in the media about liberal bias is like asking a fish about water. 'Huh, what are you talking about? Where is it?'

Topics: Media, Talking, Water

Well, who is more likely to volunteer to take a job in a bureaucracy that has little to recommend it except that it gives you the power to use government force to control the lives of others? A dispassionate scientist or a zealot? In government, the zealots eventually take over.

Topics: Jobs, Government, Volunteer, Zealot, Dispassionate

Unions say, 'Education of the children is too important to be left to the vagaries of the market.' The opposite is true. Education is too important to be left to the calcified union/government monopoly.

source: - "The Teachers Unions Are Mad at Me". abcnews.go.com. March 8, 2006.

Topics: Children, Government, Opposites

Government has no wealth of its own. Before it gives anything to anyone, it must take from those who produced it.

Topics: Government, Giving, Wealth

If individuals can take from a common pot regardless of how much they put in it, each person has an incentive to be a free rider, to do as little as possible and take as much as possible because what one fails to take will be taken by someone else.

source: - John Stossel (2012). “No, They Can't: Why Government Fails-But Individuals Succeed”, p.55, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Taken, Incentives, Littles

A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system.

source: - "Arrogance". townhall.com. July 22, 2009.

Topics: Thinking, People, Care, Health Care System

Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else's money?

source: - "The Entitlement Mess" by John Stossel, www.realclearpolitics.com. June 11, 2008.

Topics: Entitlement, Entitled

Liberalism had come to mean spending more on everything-speech police, failed poverty programs that reward dependence, a bigger nanny state telling us we cannot eat fatty foods, workplace roles that stifle opportunity, and absurd environmental regulations.

Topics: Mean, Opportunity, Police, Fatty

What private property does is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce for more. Then, if there's a free market, people will trade their surpluses to others for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer.

Topics: Mutual Benefit, Creating, People

Patrick Henry didn't say, "Give me safety, or give me death."

source: - "Patrick Henry didn’t say, 'Give me safety, or give me death'" by John Stossel, www.foxnews.com. May 9, 2012.

Topics: Safety, Giving, Give Me

The welfare state has done to Black Americans what slavery (and Jim Crow and racism) could not have done. . .break up the black family. Today, just slightly over 30 percent of black kids live in two-parent families. Historically, from the 1870s on. . . 75-90 percent of black kids lived in two-parent families.

Topics: Kids, Two, Racism, Families Today, Black Family

We like to think we're superior to the people who, centuries ago, burned 'witches' for no better reason than a neighbor's belief that his crop failure or impotence was caused by that woman's action. But reporters are still prone to the same mental errors that caused these killings: seeing patterns where there are none, finding causes where there is only coincidence, ignoring our sources' political agendas and turning scanty evidence into panic.

Topics: Thinking, Errors, People, Impotence, Political Agendas

To finance 'entitlement' programs, the government threatens force against the taxpayers who provide the money. Why are people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy?

Topics: Government, People, Favors, Entitlement Programs

Fraud will always exist. Enforcement of anti-fraud laws is a useful deterrent, but in the end there's no substitute for investor vigilance. Government regulations provide a false sense of security - and that's worth less than no sense of security at all.

Topics: Government, Law, Regulation, False Sense Of Security, Government Regulation

People vastly overestimate the ability of central planners to improve on the independent action of diverse individuals. What I've learned watching regulators is that they almost always make things worse. If regulators did nothing, the self-correcting mechanisms of the market would mitigate most problems with more finesse. And less cost.

Topics: Independent, Self, People, Overestimate, Planners

Where I live in Manhattan and where I work at ABC, people say conservative the way people say child molester.

source: - "Studio Briefing", movieweb.com. January 28, 2004.

Topics: Children, People, Manhattan

Government is so big today that more than half the population gets a major part of its income from the state.

Topics: Government, Population, Income

The market performs miracles so routinely that we take it for granted. Supermarkets provide 30,000 choices at rock-bottom prices. We take it for granted that when we stick a piece of plastic in a wall, cash will come out; that when we give the same plastic to a stranger, he will rent us a car, and the next month, Visa will have the accounting correct to the penny. By contrast, "experts" in government can't even count the vote accurately.

source: - "Market Magic: Competition Polices Companies, and It Sure Beats Regulation and Lawyers" by John Stossel, www.abcnews.go.com. April 16, 2008.

Topics: Wall, Rocks, Government

As coercive monopolies that spend other people's money taken by force, governments are uniquely unqualified to solve problems. They are riddled by ignorance, perverse incentives, incompetence and are self-serving.

source: - "Don't Look to Government to Cool Down the Planet". abcnews.go.com. November 14, 2007.

Topics: Taken, Ignorance, Government, Self Serving

Many people are priced out of the medical and insurance markets for one reason: the politicians refusal to give up power. Allowing them to seize another 16 percent of the economy won't solve our problems. Freedom will.

Topics: Giving Up, People, Medical

The theory of government I was taught says that government provides benefits, primarily security, to the entire population. In return we pay taxes. But lately the government has been a distributor of special privileges, taking money from some and giving it to others. America is now about evenly split between those who pay income taxes and those who consume them.

Topics: Government, America, Giving, Distributors

Nothing keeps a company honest and efficient like the threat of other companies coming along and taking its business away.

source: - "Market Magic: Competition Polices Companies, and It Sure Beats Regulation and Lawyers". www.abcnews.go.com. April 16, 2008.

Topics: Honest, Threat, Company

It’s not about electing the right people. It’s about a narrowing their responsibilities.

source: - John Stossel (2012). “No, They Can't: Why Government Fails-But Individuals Succeed”, p.44, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Responsibility, People

Current government regulation interferes with honest voluntary exchanges by imposing arbitrary terms and requiring tons of paperwork disclosing information no one wants anyway.

Topics: Government, Arbitrary, Want, Government Regulation

'Live and let life' used to be a noble approach to life. Now you're considered compassionate if you demand that government impose your preferences on others.

Topics: Government, Noble, Demand

Madoff's scam was small compared to Ponzi schemes the government itself runs: Social Security and Medicare.

source: - "Madoff Is a Piker" by John Stossel, townhall.com. January 7, 2009.

Topics: Running, Government, Scams, Social Security, Madoff

Most people are oblivious to F.A. Hayek's insight that the critical information needed to run an economy - or even 15 percent of one - doesn't exist in any one place where it is accessible to central planners. Instead, it is scattered piecemeal among millions of people. All those people put together are far wiser and better informed than Congress could ever be. Only markets - private property, free exchange and the price system - can put this knowledge at the disposal of entrepreneurs and consumers, ensuring the system will serve the people and not just the political class.

source: - "Arrogant Politicians" by John Stossel, abcnews.go.com. July 21, 2009.

Topics: Running, Class, People, Planners

Saying that government is not the way to solve problems is not saying that humanity cannot solve its problems. What I've finally learned is this: Despite the obstacles created by governments, voluntary networks of private individuals - through voluntary exchange - solve all sorts of challenges.

Topics: Government, Challenges, Humanity

A system that rewards politicians skilled at campaigning - which is the art of creating an illusion - and that puts hundreds of billions of coerced taxpayer dollars at the disposal of the winners will tend to attract men and women with a comparative advantage in manipulation.

Topics: Art, Men, Creating, Comparative Advantage

Give me a break - They say taxes are inevitable, like death. At least death doesn't come every year.

Topics: Years, Giving, Break

Markets are too complex to manipulate beneficially.

Topics: Manipulate, Complexes

If government were less important in our lives, politicians would have fewer goodies to trade. In return, we'd have more money and more freedom.

Topics: Government, Important, Return

Any money the government spends must be taxed, borrowed or conjured out of thin air by the Federal Reserve, and that will reduce sound private investment. Obama has no real wealth to inject into the economy. He can only move around existing money while inflation robs us of purchasing power. Meanwhile, private investors who might have produced a better engine, battery, computer, cancer treatment or other wealth-creating and life-enhancing innovations hold back for fear that big government will undermine productive efforts.

source: - "Arrogant Conceit". townhall.com. December 24, 2008.

Topics: Real, Cancer, Moving, Purchasing Power, Cancer Treatment

Prosperity comes from leaving people free in a legal system that respects their persons and property so they can pursue their dreams while taking responsibility for their actions.

Topics: Dream, Responsibility, People

Politicians and bureaucrats clearly have no idea how complicated markets are. Every day people make countless tradeoffs, in all areas of life, based on subjective value judgements and personal information as they delicately balance their interests, needs and wants. Who is in a better position than they to tailor those choices to best serve their purposes? Yet the politicians believe they can plan the medical market the way you plan a birthday party.

source: - "Arrogant Politicians" by John Stossel, abcnews.go.com. July 21, 2009.

Topics: Party, Believe, Ideas, Personal Information, Birthday Party

Freedom works, and government, when it grows beyond the barest minimum, keeps people poor.

Topics: Government, People, Poor

The one thing I've learned is that stuttering in public is never as bad as I fear it will be.

Topics: I've Learned, Stuttering, Things I've Learned

Why, in our "free" country, do Americans meekly stand aside and let the state limit our choices, even when we are dying?

source: - "John Stossel's Plan to Abolish the FDA Should Be Laughed Out of Town". www.cbsnews.com. March 1, 2010.

Topics: Country, Choices, Dying, Free Country

Government has no money of its own. All it does is take resources from one group and given them to another.

source: - "The Key to Creating Jobs" by John Stossel, www.foxnews.com. September 28, 2011.

Topics: Government, Groups, Doe

Wealthier is healthier.