John Stossel
People like getting what they think is free stuff from government.Collection: Government
Happiness comes when we test our skills towards some meaningful purpose.Collection: Happiness
All our rights are gradually eroded as government gets bigger.Collection: Government
I'm an American. I'm for prosperity. I've discovered, from 40 years of reporting, that what creates prosperity is limited government.
The happiest stutterers, I learned, are those who are willing to stutter in front of others.
No transaction happens unless it is voluntary. It only happens if both of you think you win.
The one thing I've learned is that stuttering in public is never as bad as I fear it will be.
People acting in their own self-interest is the fuel for all the discovery, innovation, and prosperity that powers the world.
I never wanted to be an anchor for 25 years, and suddenly I wanted to be one.
Give me a break.
I was a closet stutterer.
I was ashamed for people to see me struggle.
I've built my career on unpaid interns, and the interns told me it was great - I learned more from you than I did in college.
Take away the government's monopoly, and private groups will do it better.
As a free person, I ought to be allowed if I'm dying to take something.
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.
Private businesses ought to get to discriminate.
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.
The people who tried government regulation have lives which are miserable.
When entrepreneurs are free to compete, they grow the pie so that everyone's share gets larger.
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.
What I've learned in 40 years of consumer reporting is that the market is imperfect, and some people get ripped off.
Isn't allowing people a choice what America is all about?
Patrick Henry did not say, 'Give me absolutely safety or give me death.' America is supposed to be about freedom.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I like taking the subway to work.
Living with the liberals, you get to hear their arguments, fight with them all the time. Keeps me alert.
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.
I'm a libertarian. It's a terrible word.
We have all kinds of government compensation systems that are much more efficient than the lawyers.
Companies don't get rich hurting their customers.
You can either invade a country or leave them alone and trade with them. When goods cross borders, armies don't.
Why, in our 'free' country, do Americans meekly stand aside and let the state limit our choices, even when we are dying?
Competition leads both drug companies and private regulators to be trustworthy. If they are not trustworthy, they die.
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.'Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Kids
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.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Children
Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else's money?Collection: Entitlement
A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system.Collection: Thinking
Government has no wealth of its own. Before it gives anything to anyone, it must take from those who produced it.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Mutual Benefit
Life is fairer when individuals are free to make their own decisionsCollection: Decision
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.Collection: Jobs
Patrick Henry didn't say, "Give me safety, or give me death."Collection: Safety
When workers can get and equal return for less effort, workers make less effortCollection: Effort
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.Collection: Government