John Stossel Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

..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?

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

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

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

All our rights are gradually eroded as government gets bigger.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.'

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

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

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

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.

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

Companies don't get rich hurting their customers.

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

Markets are too complex to manipulate beneficially.

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

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

The politicians should not tell the people to shut up.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Private businesses ought to get to discriminate.

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

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

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.

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