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i was not offered a job by Fox.
I went over and begged,
"Please hire me; I can't stand it anymore."
You've become a very are popular person on the Fox Network both in terms of
your show and
the segments you do with Bill O'Reilly. Why did you leave ABC though?
Because it sucked there. They were hostile to these ideas that
have made us prosperous and I consider so important.
I mean they tolerated me for years. I got good ratings, so that they put the stuff on.
They sort of held their nose, and
put it on, but by the end, they were saying, "Oh, your're predictable Stossel. All you want
to do islibertarian economics all the time.
I don't want to watch that.
You already did that." I did a piece called "Stupid in America",
which got good ratings about school choice. Five years later there was a real
school choice movement. I said, "Let's do a follow-up!"
"Eh, we're not...
Michael Jackson died, and we want to interview
his sister and his mother.
We have to do a show on how he's still dead."
I was not offered a job by Fox.
I went over and begged,
"Please hire me. I can't stand it anymore."
The left is often good at proposing solutions to problems even if
those solutions won't actually do much to solve the problem, or eve if the problems
doesn't exist. So how do they have that success? How do they always
piggy back on government
solving the problem at the end of the day?
Well that's what this
No They Can't is about. That they promise this stuff.
[Enthusiastically] Elect Obama! Yes we can! We can
cure poverty, and stop the oceans from rising, as he said one
speech.
And our instinct, I think, is to believe
in the central planners. It was nuts at the Obama election. It was like he was a
magic politician who was going to do these things.
And the
promise
is all people pay attention to. People have lives.
And the failures,
which are again and again
everything, you relly have to pay attention to notice.
So how do conservatives, who often have a
more free-market and less regulatory approach,
adopt...get their message out in ways that counter this prevailing
government knows best attitude?
I like graphs. I have some in the book that help, I think,
tell the story. Under Clinton, the OSHA director had a graph. "[Sarcastically]Look how workplace
deaths have dropped since OSHA was created."
What makes it interesting, and yea,
but what makes it interesting is that the
second graph shows
before and after OSHA.
And the slope of the line is the same.
Free people make things
better on our own without
government, but we have to tell people that.
You've done a great job in your profession telling stories, and being
able to communicate complex economic issues in ways that
the American People can understand. How important of a factor is that in
communicating some of the ideas that you have?
It's very important, and I don't think i'm that
good at it.
Arthur Brooks at AEI talks about how
moral arguments for capitalism are much more effective effective than numbers and
the graphs, but I'm not good at that.I gravitate to the numbers, or the graphs,
or the gimmicks like when Paul Krugman said
9/11 would cause
an economic boom because of the rebuilding. and Nancy Pelosi said that about the
earthquake in Haiti.
It's the Bastiat Principal of the seen versus the unseen.
So how do I illustrate that?
Well I
buy from a junkyard some old TVs and cars and go there with a sledgehammer and smash
things, and say,
"Oh, Stimulus!
I'm going to create wealth and smash things because they'll have to replace these."
And then you can see the Bastiat Principal of you've got to take that
money,
money that's now going in to replace this stuff
might have been used for something else,
but that's the unseen that
the reporters don't get.
I want to ask you, the president was on the stump yesterday talking about the
"Buffet Rule" and income inequality yet again. It's clearly not going to do anything to
the
deficit, but the White House keeps bringing it up and it's probably going
to continue to do this. So is it resonating?
I would think so. It's more complicated to say that it's only going to raise
two billion
out of the one and a half trillion dollar deficit,
and it might kill the golden geese, and
some of the rich people are gonna produce less wealth, innovate less,
create fewer jobs.
Some of them are going to hire lawyer tricksters to dodge the taxes anyway.
But it took me a long time to say that. It takes Obama a second to say,
"minimum tax for millionaires." So I live in the shell of media world, and on a subject
like that
shallow wins.