In his television specials and in books like Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity: Get Out
the Shovel - Why Everything You Know is Wrong and Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters,
Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media,
reporter John Stossel has built an award-winning reputation as a tenacious
debunker of commonly-held assumptions, and as a thorn in the side of
business-as-usual bureaucrats. Now, as a welcome antidote to President Obama’s
“Yes, we can!” big-government campaign mantra, comes Stossel’s latest book, No They Can’t: Why Government Fails But
Individuals Succeed.
The libertarian Stossel hosts his own show and a series of
specials on the Fox Business Network, and appears frequently on other Fox News
shows. His consumer reporting has made him a nineteen-time Emmy winner and a
five-time honoree for excellence by the National Press Club. Those familiar
with Stossel’s laidback, plainspoken, eminently reasonable TV persona (and who
isn’t?) will find it in full evidence here in No They Can’t as well.
The book’s thirteen chapters are devoted to a wide range of
the biggest issues facing our government today, such as health care, the war on
drugs, education, military spending, and the “budget insanity.” Stossel points
out that our instinct is to believe that government can and should step in and
resolve such problems. In a rhetorical device which he returns to frequently throughout
the book, he posits “What Intuition Tempts Us to Believe: When there’s a
problem, government should act.” He answers that with “What Reality Taught Me:
Individuals should act, not government.”
The overarching, “most socially destructive” assumption of
all, writes Stossel, is “the intuitively appealing belief that when there is a
problem, government action is the best way to solve it.” For him, “Good
government has to mean less government.” One would think that this sentiment
would put Stossel squarely in the Tea Party camp. But he believes that even
many Tea Party activists don’t want to cut the big government tether entirely
(“61% of Tea Party sympathizers believe free trade has hurt the United States,”
for example). And he notes that even Tea Party politician favorites can’t be
trusted once they’re in office.
He reserves most of his attacks for the big-government left (“Progressives
always fear the ‘power’ of business, rather than the power of government”). He won’t
endear himself to environmentalists, for example, with this take on the
government stepping in to protect endangered species: “How do we save them?
Here’s an idea: Sell them. And eat them.”But he doesn’t believe Republicans have all the answers either:
Both parties share the fatal
conceit of believing that their grandiose plan will solve America’s problems. Neither
plan will… It doesn’t matter which party is in power. No one spends other
people’s money as carefully as he spends his own.
Stossel’s solutions to the country’s problems lie in the
free market. “Government is like someone who gets in front of a parade and
pretends to lead it,” he writes, whereas “creative minds of the private sector
invent solutions that never occur to government bureaucrats.” While the free
market isn’t perfect, Stossel says, bad things happen when government
interferes – primarily, infringements on our liberty.
Take what Stossel calls the Food Police, for example. Do we
really need the government to save us from our own poor food choices?
“Government goes astray when it tries to protect us from ourselves,” he says. Free
competition protects consumers best. In any case, whether or not government
makes us safer, its rules always leave us less free:
The Food Police claim that they
just want to help us make informed choices. But that’s not all they want to do.
They want government to force us to
make healthy choices.
The powerful assumption behind so
much of government’s policy regarding food (and everything else) is that everything good should be encouraged by law
and everything bad should be discouraged.
Stated that way, it sounds like common sense. But… this is a formula for
totalitarianism.
That totalitarianism extends to, as he puts it in one chapter
title, making sure no one gets offended. About the government curtailing free
speech in order to spare people’s feelings: “When getting offended gives people
more power, people get offended more easily… We should never let government
decide which ideas are worthy of protection and which are not.” As for being
offended by Stossel himself, he’s fine with that: “If you disagree with me,
argue with me. Shun me. And yes, even boycott me. Just don’t bring in
government to settle the issue.”
When it comes to military spending in money pits like
Afghanistan and Iraq, Stossel believes that “nation building is the worst form
of planning,” and that rather than increasing or even maintaining a bloated
military budget, “our soldiers are better served if we narrow their mission.”
Despite the range of issues covered in this book, and the
wealth of examples, Stossel’s main point is very basic and simple. In his
conclusion, aptly entitled “There Ought Not
to Be a Law,” he sums up:
There is nothing that government
can do that we cannot do better as free individuals – and as groups of
individuals, working together voluntarily, not at the point of a gun or under
threat of a fine.
Without big government, our
possibilities are endless.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 4/23/12)
