Voice For Liberty

Tag: Capitalism

  • Causes of global finance crisis explained in Wichita

    Today, an audience of 600 business and civic leaders attended the 30th annual Economic Outlook Conference at Century II, produced by the Center for Economic Development and Business Research (CEDBR) at Wichita State University.

    The featured speaker was John A. Allison, chairman and former CEO of BB&T Corporation, the nation’s 10th largest financial-holding company. Its headquarters are in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

    The primary cause of the recent financial crisis is our federal government’s policies and actions, Allison said.

    It’s not the fault of free markets, as some allege, because we don’t have a free market economy. We have a mixed economy, with some industries such as financial services being highly regulated by government.

    What was the cause of the real estate bubble? We built too many houses, many of larger size than we should have built, and we built them in the wrong places, he said.

    How did we make such a mistake? Allison said there are four causes or actors that contributed to the problem: the Federal Reserve Bank, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), housing policy as implemented by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

    The action of these agencies turned a natural correction into a panic. Also, the policies government has taken since then may help us in the short term, but will almost certainly hurt us in the long run.

    The Federal Reserve’s errors include creating inducements to take risk based on false signals. The inverted yield curve that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke created induced banks to take on more risk than they had been assuming. Also, “The huge level of federal debt we have today would not be practical if the government did not own the monetary system.”

    The Fed has sophisticated financial models to help it manage the economy, but these can’t integrate the economic activity of billions of humans. Illustrating this, Allison mentioned Frederich Hayek’s “fatal conceit,” where smart people believe they can do the impossible.

    The FDIC contributed to the problem by allowing start-up banks to offer high interest rates to depositors. With FDIC insurance, depositors don’t have any incentive to investigate the soundness of the banks in which they place their deposits. This has led to a lack of market discipline.

    Government housing policy has been a long-term problem. Spurred by the theory that home ownership for everyone is a good thing, in 1999, the Clinton administration announced that it would be the goal of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to have at least half their loans in so-called “affordable housing,” now called sub-prime mortgages.

    At the time, economists, including liberal economists, warned that this is risky, and that this course could take them down, and the U.S. economy with it within ten years. Nine years later it happened, Allison said, and the government was forced to bail out these two agencies.

    Politics played a role in this. Allison said he served on financial services roundtable committee for nine years. This committee warned Congress numerous times that it was certain that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae would go broke. But Congress wouldn’t listen. Part of the reason was the political contributions to both Democrats (that party’s single largest contributor) and Republicans made by these two agencies.

    Fair value accounting regulations, particularly mark-to-market, led to inaccurate valuation of some assets when markets are thin (not many buyers). When banks were forced to mark down the values of assets more than what economic reality indicated, the loss of capital was multiplied, because banks are leveraged. This lead to larger losses in lending capacity that what was necessary.

    Banks with cash might be willing to assume the economic risk of purchasing some of these assets, but they couldn’t assume the accounting risk of future losses. This is an example of the distortions produced by our government-created accounting system, regulated by the SEC. Large and even small businesses don’t use this accounting system for their own management, because it’s not a good measure of value.

    The actions of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae also led to the end of the “originate and hold” model for home mortgages, where banks and thrifts would make home loans, and then hold those loans as part of their portfolio of assets. Private institutions simply could not compete with these government-backed institutions.

    This led to the “broker model” or “originate and sell,” which had a terrible incentive. If you simply originate loans but don’t hold them and its risk, your incentive is to originate as many loans as possible, without regard to the riskiness of the loan.

    Summarizing the first part of Allison’s lecture: It is government policy that is largely responsible for the crisis. Free markets are commonly being blamed for the crisis, but this assessment is false. Our economy, as Allison has shown, is far removed from free and unregulated. Government intervenes everywhere.

    Allison presented a great deal of information in his talk, including some steps we should take to get out of this crisis and to prevent another. I’ll report on this soon.

  • ‘Not Evil Just Wrong’ filmmaker tells of harms of radical environmentalists

    Update: for my review of the film, click on “Not Evil Just Wrong” a powerful refutation of Al Gore, environmental extremism.

    Watching the film she made, I became angry. After talking with her, I feel better, but I’m still angry.

    She’s Ann McElhinney. The film she made is Not Evil Just Wrong. It’s a very powerful antidote to former vice president Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth and the extremism it has generated.

    McElhinney was in Wichita yesterday to speak to a civic group. I attended her talk, and then spoke with her afterwards.

    So why am I angry? Over and over, Gore and other radical environmentalists disregard facts and science, while at the same time proclaiming that the scientific debate is over. And it’s not just an academic debate. As Not Evil Just Wrong illustrates, millions of lives are at stake, as well as our standard of living.

    An important episode in the film isn’t directly related to the global warming debate, but it serves to illustrate the ways we’ve been wrong before, and it gives us insight into one of the most visible personalities driving global warming extremism.

    “Who here has played in the fog behind DDT trucks,” McElhinney asked the audience in Wichita. The widespread use of DDT led to the eradication of malaria in America and large parts of the world. But then a book — Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring — made a connection between DDT and danger to animal and human life. A worldwide ban on DDT followed, and malaria returned, especially to parts of Africa. Millions have died of malaria since then. In Uganda alone, 370 children per day die from malaria. She asked: if this was happening in Kansas, wouldn’t we do anything to stop it?

    Everyone believed Carson’s story about DDT. But it was based more on speculation than good science.

    In 2006, the World Health Organization said that Carson was wrong. But Gore still defends Carson. He wrote the introduction to an edition of her book. He visited her homestead.

    So when Gore says that carbon dioxide is going to ruin the planet, should we pay him much attention? His film An Inconvenient Truth has received a lot of attention, including winning an Oscar. But McElhinney played a clip from Not Evil Just Wrong that showed how the British High Court found that the film contains nine significant exaggerations or scientific errors.

    One of these exaggerations is Gore’s claim that sea levels will rise by 20 feet in the near future. The IPCC says this might happen over thousands of years. But schoolchildren in Ireland still get Gore’s erroneous message, and they fear that they will drown.

    McElhinney says that “it’s an extraordinary position for Al Gore to take — as a Nobel Laureate, Oscar winner, Emmy winner — to not go back and re-edit the film and take out the errors.”

    One of the loudest things we hear from the left, McElhinney says, is that “the discussion is over.” Greens say that global warming is settled scientific fact, humans are at fault, and we have to change the way we live. Her film, she says, shows that this is not conclusive. The scientific method calls for continued checking and debate, and those who call for an end to the debate are anti-scientific.

    Energy, especially inexpensive energy, is a wonderful thing, she said. “People in America are very lucky to have the energy that you have. … People get to live long, and get to do really exciting things and make loads of choices, and this doesn’t happen everywhere. … The freedom that people have in America is because of energy. The idea that we would take away energy is, that we would reduce the amount of energy is the most crazy thing I’ve ever heard.” She cautioned us to be careful not to throw away our advantage of inexpensive energy.

    Responding to a question from the audience, McElhinney reminded the audience of the existence of radical environmentalists who are opposed to chemicals and pesticides because they want everything to be “natural.” But disease and short life, she said, is the natural state of man.

    After her talk, I asked McElhinney about the motivations of people like Al Gore. Does he know the facts, that the famous hockey stick graph is wrong and that the DDT ban has cost millions of lives? Does he know these things and decides to ignore them, or is he just innocently mistaken? She said she thinks that he does know the truth, but he is ideologically driven. Those who are so ideologically blinkered have to stay with their story, even though the facts disagree with them.

    Also, Greens (radical environmentalists) think that animals are more important then people. Being elitists, too, the harmful effects of a misplaced war on carbon dioxide won’t affect them on a personal level as it will the masses of people.

    I’ve seen Not Evil Just Wrong, and it uses a powerful technique of putting a face, a person, on the issues. McElhinney said that while it’s hard to comprehend of millions of children dying of malaria, “it’s very easy to understand the death of one child.”

    Responding to another question, she said that the war against carbon emissions also a war against capitalism, and is also anti-American, with many initiatives directed against America. The wealth generated by capitalism allows people to cultivate gardens, for example, instead of doing whatever is necessary — including damaging the environment — to stay alive.

    Coverage from Kansas Watchdog is at “Not Evil, Just Wrong” Counters Environmental Extremism.

    Not Evil Just Wrong will be shown in Wichita on Sunday, October 18, as part of its nationwide premier. This free event will be at the CAC Theater at Wichita State University. It starts at 6:00 pm, with meteorologist Mike Smith presenting “An Atmospheric Scientist’s View of Global Warming” at 6:15. The movie will start at 7:00 pm. It runs 85 minutes. I’ll have my review of the movie next week.

  • The real right to medical care versus socialized medicine

    In 1994, George Reisman wrote a pamphlet explaining the problems with America’s health care system. He criticized the Clinton plan for reform, and offered an alternative based on freedom and markets rather than government interventionism. It is a brilliant work, and still relevant today: “I wrote this essay to help defeat the Clinton plan for socialized medicine. In all essentials it’s as valid today as it was then. It’s a demonstration that government intervention inspired by the philosophy of collectivism is the cause of America’s medical crisis and that a free market in medical care is the solution for the crisis. I urge everyone who wants to help defeat the essentially similar Obama scheme to read it.”

    You can read the pamphlet by clicking on The real right to medical care versus socialized medicine. It’s lengthy, at about 22,000 words. It takes a while to read. Part of what accounts for its length is Reisman’s explanation of every point he makes, which is very helpful.

    Reisman calls for more than simply defeating the Clinton plan, as we who oppose the Obama plan should be doing too. He calls for reform — radical reform — of America’s health care, and presents a plan.

    By way of introduction, Reisman writes

    … while the philosophy of Marx and Engels is dying, the philosophy of Locke and Jefferson, and Adam Smith, that is, the philosophy of individual freedom and capitalism underlying the American Revolution — the philosophy which, ironically enough, was the original meaning of the word liberalism — has been reborn. It has been reborn first and foremost at the hands of Ayn Rand in political philosophy and of Ludwig von Mises in economic theory, both of whom have enormously strengthened it. This philosophy of individual freedom, of the inviolability of individual rights, of the benevolent functioning of an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and the profit motive — of capitalism — calls for a radically new political agenda. It calls for a political agenda that progressively rolls back the interference of the state and progressively enlarges the freedom of the individual. This is now what political philosophy and economic theory at their highest levels of development recognize to be the essential means of solving social and economic problems. Movement in this direction — in the direction of individual freedom from government interference — is henceforth to be regarded as the standard of what is to be considered progress in the realm of political action.

    It is on the basis of this newly resurgent, radically different political philosophy and economic theory — this philosophy and theory of individual rights and capitalism — that I explain the causes of the present crisis in medical care, criticize the Clinton plan, and present the appropriate solution and how to achieve it.

    The fundamental problem is this: “… the perverted notion of the need-based right to medical care — that is, an alleged right to medical care that entails a claim on other people’s wealth or labor, which must be met with or without their consent — is what underlies both the collectivization of medical costs and the concomitant loss of the individual’s personal financial responsibility. In this way, it is a perverted notion of the right to medical care that is fundamentally responsible for the rising cost of medical care.”

    Reisman goes on to explain, in detail, how the present system of purchasing health care leads to a variety of problems, such as “the potential for a limitless rise in the price of medical services” and “irrational medical malpractice awards and the practice of defensive medicine.” Most people seem to agree that these problems are present. He also explains how the present system is “perverting technological progress into a source of higher costs rather than lower costs,” how it is responsible for high drug prices, and how hospitals waste money buying costly equipment that is not needed.

    He also explains “bureaucratic interference with medicine and the rise in administrative costs,” characteristics of private health insurance companies that those who support government takeover rail against.

    Reisman then criticizes the details of the Clinton plan. These apply equally to the Obama plan.

    Then, Reisman proposes his solution. It’s not more government, which is what Obama offers. It’s less government and restoration of individual rights:

    The actual solution to the problem of runaway medical costs lies in the precise opposite of the direction chosen by the Clinton plan. It is not the final destruction of the individual’s rational right to medical care, which is what the Clinton plan would achieve, but the restoration and full implementation of that right — that is, the removal of all government interference that stands between buyers and sellers of medical care or in any way causes medical care to be more expensive than it otherwise would be.

    The best way to accomplish reform, Reisman writes, is: “The simplest, most obvious method of achieving a free market in medical care would be at one stroke to abolish all government intervention that violates a free market in medical care.”

    Recognizing that this is not likely to happen, Reisman proposes some steps to take.

    The first is a change in the tax laws that would have the effect of “[having] employees realize that they were responsible for the cost of their own medical care, even if the employer continued to pay insurance premiums on their behalf. This is because the individual employee would know that he could have his share of the money his employer paid on his behalf, in his own pocket if he wished.” In other words, dissolve many peoples’ notion that their health care is free (or very low cost) just because they get it as part of their job.

    Next, end the idea that Medicare is a free resource: “… unless they can demonstrate a lack of means, individuals covered by Medicare be required to pay a substantial deductible before their coverage under the program begins and then to make a continuing copayment of a significant percentage of all costs beyond some maximum limit. ”

    To increase the supply of health care, “it is certainly reasonable to ask that medical licensing laws be liberalized — nothing so extreme, mind you, as their outright abolition, but merely their significant liberalization.”

    To control hospital costs, a radical reduction in the regulation hospitals face is required.

  • Privatization of Wichita city parks

    In a post concerning the possible privatization of City of Wichita parks maintenance, I called for, in a rather oblique way, privatization of city parks. A commenter picked up on this and wrote “I’m wondering how the parks would be decided by the market. Wouldn’t the parks have to charge an entry fee in that case?”

    It’s a good question. Broadly, what would happen if the City of Wichita decided not to provide public parks? Would there then be any privately owned parks? What would these parks be like, if there were any?

    As there are very few examples of privately-owned parks in America, we don’t really know how privately-owned parks would work. But that’s no reason we shouldn’t consider this idea.

    The first thing we need to do is to dissuade ourselves of the false notion that the present system of municipal parks means free parks. They aren’t free. They seem to be free — or nearly so — to those who use them, because there is no admission fee charged.

    One way that private parks might work is that their owners would charge an admission fee. This doesn’t necessarily mean that there would be an impenetrable fence surrounding the park and a toll gate at the single entrance. There could be other ways to collect admission fees.

    Another way that a private owner might generate revenue and potential profit through owning a park is by the selling of concessions. Besides the obvious selling of food and drink, some other examples come to mind. A vendor might rent lockers for the storage of bicycles, so that it would be convenient for people to drive to the park and use their bicycles.

    Vendors might rent roller skates. I rented these in college on the KU campus, and it was fun. Other things could be rented too, even paddle boats on the Little Arkansas River, as in the old days.

    A private park might offer nanny service, so parents could drop off their young children for a session of supervised play.

    A private park would probably provide security services so that its patrons feel safe. Would people be willing to pay for that?

    A private park might sell advertising or sponsorship. Philanthropy could play a role, too.

    So there could be many ways in which private parks could operate.

    While the goal of private park owners would usually be to attract many people to patronize their parks, private owners would be able to exclude people from the park. Advocates for the present parks workers say that the workers clean the public parks of needles and syringes. This indicates that at present, the parks are used for activities that most people, especially families, don’t want to be around. Would a private owner of a park have an incentive to keep his park free of illegal drug users? Absolutely — and much more so than it appears the Wichita police do. And being privately owned, the owner would have the right to exclude drug users, noisemakers, smokers, beer drinkers, panhandlers, fornicators, proselytizers, sidewalk preachers, politicians, and others from his park. He could even impose a dress code.

    (Which reminds me of a joke: A conservative said, “I am distressed by the idea of fornication in public parks.” The libertarian replied, “I am distressed by the idea of public parks.” )

    Privately-owned parks would bring benefits, the nature of which we really can’t foresee and predict. Entrepreneurs are highly motivated to discover and meet consumer wishes and demands. They can experiment to see what works. The costs of their failures are born only by them. When public officials take risks and fail, they’re criticized for wasting public funds. This is a reason why little innovation comes from government.

    By unleashing entrepreneurial creativity, there might be a tremendous diversity of parks springing up with features we can’t even dream of now.

    Entrepreneurs don’t have to go through plodding approval of long-range plans as Wichita recently did with its Parks, Recreation, and Open Space (PROS) plan. This plan, according to its brochure, took 18 months to develop. How will it be funded? According to a memo accompanying the plan, “Present funding levels are insufficient to adequately cover the costs of the Department’s current facilities and programs.” I don’t sense much groundswell of support for raising revenue to increase this funding. So are we left to conclude that the method of public funding of the parks is failing? It seems so.

    Back to my post from the other day: Another commenter wrote that the views I hold are those of “free-market extremists.” To which I reply: thank you for noticing.

    This writer also wrote: “Hence, if there is no market or capitalistic value for parks, then why have them at all.”

    This is my point. If people don’t value parks enough to pay for them as they use them (or let private owners profit in ways that I described above, or in other ways), then we’re faced with the situation we have today: First the government taxes everyone. Then politicians, bureaucrats, and a small group of enthusiasts decide how much recreation the people should have, and where and in what form.

    I ask you: could anything be more extreme — not to mention counterproductive — than this?

  • Profit motive in health care is essential

    Those in favor of government health care often argue that private insurance companies are inefficient, wasting huge sums in administrative overhead that provides no benefit to patients.

    At the same time, the same people blast private insurance companies for being driven by the profit motive.

    I wonder: who has the greater incentive to avoid wasting money on useless overhead? The government, or a private company that can keep the money saved as profits?

    Further: private health insurance companies operate in competitive markets. Those companies that spend needlessly on overhead that doesn’t add value will go out of business. That’s the neat thing about competition and free markets, as realized in the form of profits and losses: these forces help companies learn the best way to organize and how much to spend on the various things that make their businesses run.

    Companies that make unwise decisions will see their profits suffer or will incur losses. This is a signal that other companies are more efficient.

    Government, on the other hand, is immune to the forces of competition. It can waste whatever it wants with little consequence. Once in a while people notice and vote someone out of office, but this doesn’t happen very often.

    For those who point to Medicare’s low overhead costs, here’s a blog post that explains: Busting Medicare’s “Low Overhead Advantage” Myth.

  • In Wichita, special assessment financing gone wild

    At today’s meeting of the Wichita City Council, a privately-owned condominium association is seeking special assessment financing to make repairs to its building.

    Special assessment financing means that the cost of the repairs, $112,620 in this case, will be added to the building’s property taxes. Actually, in this case, to each of the condominium owners’ taxes. They’ll pay it off over the course of 15 years.

    So the city is not giving this money to the building’s owners. They’ll have to pay it back. The city is, however, setting new precedent in this action.

    First, special assessment financing has traditionally been used to fund infrastructure such as streets and sewers, and new infrastructure at that. The city, under its facade improvement program, now allows this type of financing to be used to make repairs and renovations to existing buildings. That’s if your building is located in one of the politically-favored areas of town. Not all buildings will qualify.

    By using special assessment financing in this way, the city seeks to direct investment towards parts of town that it feels doesn’t have enough investment. This form of centralized government planning is bad public policy. The city should stop doing this, and let people freely choose where to invest.

    This case, however, is an even more egregious example of the city’s desire to control where and how people invest.

    The agenda report for this item details two exceptions to the city’s facade improvement program that must be waived for this project to obtain special assessment financing.

    The first is the private investment match. Here, the city is proposing that since the building’s owners have made a past private investment in this property, there’s no need to require a concurrent investment.

    Second, facade improvement projects are required to undergo a gap analysis to “prove” the need for public financing. According to the report: “This project does not lend itself to this type of gap analysis; however, staff believes that conventional financing would be difficult to obtain for exterior repairs to a residential condominium property like this.”

    So the city proposes to waive this requirement as well.

    What would happen if the city council doesn’t approve the special assessment financing? The agenda report states “Each individual condo owner would be required to fund a share of the cost.”

    Isn’t that what private property owners do: fund the cost of repairs to their property?

    Today’s action, if approved, would set a public hearing on July 7.

    If the city council approves this project — and I suspect it will with no dissenting votes — we must now realize that Wichita has a mayor, city council, and city staff that are willing to throw any principle aside for political expediency.

    By the way, the developer of this building is Real Development. Its principles, particularly Michael Elzufon, are familiar to the mayor and some council members as campaign donors. Its public relations executive has been the campaign manager for the mayor and a city council member.

    In the past I’ve referred to Real Development as “crony capitalists,” defined in Investopedia this way: “A description of capitalist society as being based on the close relationships between businessmen and the state. Instead of success being determined by a free market and the rule of law, the success of a business is dependent on the favoritism that is shown to it by the ruling government in the form of tax breaks, government grants and other incentives.”

    Elzufon took exception to that characterization. After asking for this special assessment financing project and its waivers, it fits even better.

    (This is a Scribd document. Click on the rectangle at the right of the document’s title bar to get a full-screen view.)

    Petition to Renovate Building Facade in the Core Area 2009-06-23

  • Environmental myths of the Left

    One of the powerful stories radical environmentalists — or any environmentalists for that matter — tell is how the river in Cleveland caught on fire. Water burning: that’s a real environmental disaster. Government must step in and do something!

    Today the Competitive Enterprise Institute tells the true story. It turns out that it was not capitalism gone wild that caused the fire, but too much government and lack of property rights.

    Progressivism, Not Capitalism, to Blame for Cleveland River Fire

    Washington, D.C., June 22, 2009 — Today is the 40th Anniversary of the famous Cuyahoga river fire in Cleveland, Ohio. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is celebrating the anniversary, because it “led to positive results, including creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and passage of major environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act in 1972 [which meant] we paid attention to how much pollution manufacturers were putting into waterways like the Cuyahoga. The legislation set limits on pollution, and gave EPA the power to fine industry for violating those limits.”

    Yet this received wisdom mischaracterizes what happened in 1969 and the reaction to it. Thanks to the work of free-market environmental scholars like Prof. Jonathan Adler of Case Western University (a former CEI scholar), we know the truth about the Cuyahoga River, which includes facts like:

    • The fire of 1969 was not regarded as a big deal in Cleveland. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer covered it in 5 paragraphs on page 11 and firefighters were quoted as calling the blaze “unremarkable.”
    • The fire was under control within 30 minutes and no TV crews made it there on time. The images most people remember were stock images of an earlier fire in 1952.
    • Local industry had in fact been trying to get the river cleaned up for decades. A paper company had sued to prevent the city dumping sewage into the river as early as 1936. A real estate company actually won a victory in such an attempt in 1965, but this was overturned by the courts.
    • What prevented clean-up was government control. The City of Cleveland claimed a “prescriptive right” to use the river as a communal dumping ground. The State of Ohio operated a permit system that encouraged using the river that way.
    • Cleanup actually started after the 1952 fire, with fish reappearing in 1959, although this was delayed because of state and local government control over the river.

    Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Iain Murray wrote about the Cuyahoga River Fire in his 2008 book, The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About-Because They Helped Cause Them. Murray said “the Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969 is an environmentalist myth. It is a myth because it was a minor incident, and it is a myth because it actually demonstrated government’s role in environmental degradation.”

    Murray added that “real riparian property rights would have stopped the fires from ever happening. You don’t spit on your own doorstep. Instead, Cleveland declared common ownership and invited spitting.”

  • Wichita facade improvement plan updated

    Wichita’s facade improvement plan has recently been updated. The updated plan isn’t yet available on the city’s website, so I’ve included it at the end of this article.

    This is the plan under which a local business, Delano Barbeque Partners, LLC, is likely to receive a grant of $20,000. See Wichita to consider grant to business for more. So far that business has not returned telephone calls asking for information about its application.

    It appears that this grant program is an entitlement, in that if a business meets specified criteria, it will receive a grant. No consideration is given to the economic worthiness or need of each applicant, or to the effect that this has on the citizens and taxpayers of Wichita.

    Programs like this are government planning. It’s our city government saying that investment in certain areas of town are more desired than investment in other parts of town. Since people aren’t investing enough to fulfill the city’s plan, the city must correct this alleged market failure by giving gifts of taxpayer money.

    This type of centralized government planning is an affront to freedom, liberty, and capitalism. It’s a slap in the face to those who have invested according to their own wants and needs, rather than satisfying the needs of politicians and bureaucrats.

    (This is a Scribd document. Click on the rectangle at the right of the document’s title bar to get a full-screen view.)

  • John Stossel: The Reason.tv interview

    From Reason.tv.

    John Stossel is the best-known libertarian in the news media.

    As the co-anchor of the long-running and immensely popular ABC News program 20/20, auteur of a continuing series of specials on topics ranging from corporate welfare to educational waste to laws criminalizing consensual adult behavior, and author of best-selling books such as Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity, Stossel brings a consistent message of liberty to millions of viewers on a weekly basis.

    After watching part 1, watch part 2.