Quotes by John Stossel - Page 2

People acting in their own self-interest is the fuel for all the discovery, innovation, and prosperity that powers the world.
John Stossel / Reporter
Discovery
Fuel
Innovation
People
Prosperity
Self
Self Interest
Powers
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Asking someone in the media about liberal bias is like asking a fish about water. 'Huh, what are you talking about? Where is it?'
John Stossel / Reporter
Media
Talking
Water
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I'm an American. I'm for prosperity. I've discovered, from 40 years of reporting, that what creates prosperity is limited government.
John Stossel / Reporter
Government
Limited Government
Prosperity
Years
Creates
Discovered
Reporting
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Government
Important
Return
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I won't ever got to a place that's racist, and I will tell everybody else not to and I'll speak against them. But it should be their right to be racist.
John Stossel / Reporter
Everybody Else
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'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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Government
Demand
Noble
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Authority
Bias
Littles
Should
Authorities
Central
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Running
Passion
Worry
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Jobs
Kids
Bully
Cameras
Following
Instinct
Bullies
Camera
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Current government regulation interferes with honest voluntary exchanges by imposing arbitrary terms and requiring tons of paperwork disclosing information no one wants anyway.
John Stossel / Reporter
Government
Arbitrary
Want
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Dream
People
Responsibility
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There is all of this protesting against corporate power, but in reality, corporations have to persuade you - they could have a ton of money, but actually only government can use force.
John Stossel / Reporter
Government
Corporate
Corporations
Force
Reality
Power Money Government
Against
Actually
Persuade
Protesting
Ton
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Competition
Consumers
Regulation
Simple
Praising
Criticizing
Saw
Help
Occasionally
Worse
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Government
Watches
Years
Government Better Will
Consumer
Fail
Intuitively
Reaction
Reporting
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When we were scared about 9/11, we federalized the airport security, we spent millions for body armor for dogs in Ohio. All that over-reaction comes from fear and government - bad combination.
John Stossel / Reporter
Armor
Combination
Millions
Ohio
Scared
Security
Airport
Dogs
Spent
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Government
Children
Opposites
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Government
Ignorance
Taken
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Medical
Giving Up
People
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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?
John Stossel / Reporter
Government
Favors
People
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Government
Long
Years
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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.'
John Stossel / Reporter
Compassion
Mean
Wanting Someone
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Incentives
Littles
Taken
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Government
Law
Regulation
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Opportunity
Mean
Police
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
America
Creative
Creative People
Factories
People
Restaurants
Thousand
Good People America
Month
Bankrupt
Close
Employ
Go Away
Productively
Rescuing
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Creating
Mutual Benefit
People
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Art
Men
Creating
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Jobs
Government
Giving
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Government
Challenges
Humanity
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Jobs
Real
Simple
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Kids
Racism
Two
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Kids
Running
School
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Jobs
Government
Believe
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Independent
People
Self
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Government
America
Giving
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..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?
John Stossel / Reporter
Mean
Real
Thinking
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Government
Rocks
Wall
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Errors
People
Thinking
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Believe
Ideas
Party
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Kids
Government
Eight
Thinking
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Cancer
Moving
Real
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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.
John Stossel / Reporter
Running
Class
People
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John Stossel Quotes - Page 2

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