Last week on "The O'Reilly Factor", we talked about California's and New York's enormous budget deficits and planned tax increases. Those states would have big surpluses had they just grown their governments in pace with inflation. But of course they didn't. Now the politicians act like their current deficits are something imposed on them by the recession.

But that's nonsense. They created the problem with their reckless spending.

Let's look at the particulars. Had the government of New York state grown at the...]]> Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 As an American, I am embarrassed that the U.S. House of Representatives has 220 members who actually believe the government can successfully centrally plan the medical and insurance industries.

I'm embarrassed that my representatives think that government can subsidize the consumption of medical care without increasing the budget deficit or interfering with free choice.

It's a triumph of mindless wishful thinking over logic and experience.

The 1,990-page bill is breathtaking in its bone-headed audacity. The notion that a small group of politicians can know enough to design something so complex and so personal is astounding. That they were advised by "experts" means...]]> Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 I made The New York Times last week. It even ran my picture. My mother would be proud.

Unfortunately, the story was critical. It said, "Critics have leaped on Mr. Stossel's speaking engagements as the latest evidence of conservative bias on the part of Fox."

Which "critics" had "leaped"? The reporter mentioned Rachel Maddow. I wouldn't think her criticism newsworthy, but Times reporters may use MSNBC as their guide to life. He also quoted an "associate professor of journalism" who said my speeches were "'pretty shameful' by traditional journalistic standards." All this because I spoke at an event for Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a "conservative advocacy group."

It...]]> Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Much of what government does is based on the premise that people can't do things for themselves. So government must do it for them. More often than not, the result is a ham-handed, bumbling, one-size-fits-all approach that leaves the intended beneficiaries worse off. Of course, this resulting failure is never blamed on the political approach -- on the contrary, failure is taken to mean the government solution was not extravagant enough.

We who have confidence in what free people can achieve have long believed that government should not venture beyond its narrow sphere of providing physical security. It should not attempt to cure every social ill. So it's good to learn that serious...]]> Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Pundits and politicians act as if government can solve almost any problem. At the slightest hint of trouble, the ruling class reflexively assumes that knowledgeable, wise and public-spirited government regulators are capable of riding to the rescue. This certainly is the guiding philosophy of the Obama administration.

So how remarkable it is that this year's Nobel Memorial Prize in economics was shared by Elinor Ostrom, whose life's work demonstrates that politicians and bureaucrats are not nearly as good at solving problems as regular people. Ostrom, the first woman to win the prize (which she shared with Oliver Williamson of UC-Berkeley),...]]> Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Michael Moore is confused.

His new movie, "Capitalism: A Love Story," begins by suggesting that all was well until Ronald Reagan became president and cut the top 90 percent income tax rate. Everything was downhill from there.

But by the end of the movie, he says the problems really began in 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt died without enacting his proposed Second Bill of Rights, which would have "guaranteed' everything from a "remunerative job" and a "decent home" to "adequate medical care," a "good education" and "adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment".

Adding to the...]]> Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul," George Bernard Shaw once said.

For a socialist, Shaw demonstrated good sense with that quotation. Unfortunately, America has become a laboratory in which his hypothesis is being tested.

The theory of government I was taught says that government provides benefits, primarily security, to the entire population. In return we pay taxes. But lately the government has been a distributor of special privileges, taking money from some and giving it to others. America is now about evenly split between those who pay income taxes and those who consume them.

The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center...]]> Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 This Friday, September's job-loss total will be announced. Whatever the numbers, administration officials surely will tell us that life is better -- because of them. "We brought the global economy back from the brink," President Obama said at the close of the G-20 meeting last week. "(B)ecause of the bold and coordinated action that we took, millions of jobs have been saved or created; the decline in output has been stopped; financial markets have come back to life".

This has been the president's theme: His so-called stimulus package, bailouts for politically connected banks and industries,...]]> Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 When I announced last week that I was leaving ABC for Fox, some readers complained about my "bias." I replied: "Every reporter has political beliefs. The difference is that I am upfront about mine."

Look at today's burning issue: President Obama's pledge to redesign 15 percent of the economy. Virtually every reporter calls his health care plan "reform." But dictionaries define reform as "improvement."
So before they present any evidence, reporters pronounce Obama's plan an improvement. Isn't that bias?

The New York Times took its bias to an absurd length. Its page-one story on the big anti-big-government rally in Washington,...]]> Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 It's time for a change. Next month, I leave ABC News to start a weekly one-hour prime time show with Fox News.

When I announced that on my blog (http://tinyurl.com/quu9j5), plenty of viewers said they were happy to have me leave.

"Goodbye. You suck. You have found a much better home for your garbage reporting and backwards politics."

"Congratulations on the move to the network intellectually suited to your quasi-libertarian corporate-apologist hackery!"

Oh well, you can't please everyone. I don't expect that my libertarian beliefs will please everyone at Fox, either.

Years ago, ABC hired me to do consumer...]]> Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 I wish President Obama would say to Congress: Members of Congress, I ask you to address our fiscal emergency.

In 1964, President Johnson won a landslide victory -- quite similar to mine. His election also brought liberals into Congress. The next year, they created the first government-run health care plan: Medicare.

They meant well, but unfortunately, this was the height of fiscal irresponsibility. I know Medicare is popular with the elderly. Of course it is. Everyone likes getting free things. But it is unsustainable.

Retirees believe that their Medicare bills are paid from a "trust fund" that was created with deductions from their paychecks. But this is a...]]> Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The economic illiterates in Washington are so impressed with the "success" of Cash for Clunkers that they're readying Cash for Clunker Appliances. The ludicrous "stimulus" bill gave $300 million to the Department of Energy to provide rebates for 10 types of appliances that have been rated energy efficient.

Before government extends Cash for Clunkers to more products, it might be a good idea to examine the original. The fact that Washington and the buyers who took advantage of Cash for Clunkers are gaga is hardly evidence that it was in the public interest.

It wasn't. As usual, the program has been judged only by its first and most...]]> Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "Choice, competition, reducing costs -- those are the things that I want to see accomplished in this health reform bill," President Obama told talk-show host Michael Smerconish last week.

Choice and competition would be good. They would indeed reduce costs. If only the president meant it. Or understood it.

In a free market, a business that is complacent about costs learns that its prices are too high when it sees lower-cost competitors winning over its customers. The market -- actually, the consumer -- holds businesses accountable and keeps them honest. No "public option" is needed.

So the hope for reducing medical costs indeed...]]> Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 False charges about Obamacare don't help.

Like the end-of-life tempest. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin popularized the term "death panels." She said: "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care".

The charge that the House and Senate health care bills would mandate end-of-life counseling -- hence "death panels" -- caught on. Rush Limbaugh,...]]> Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand," Frank Rich wrote in Sunday's New York Times.

That manipulation should disturb us. But contrary to Rich, it is not the work of "corporatists" who have sprung up to attack progressive reforms proposed by Obama and the Democratic majority. Manipulation is what we got many years ago when we traded a more or less free market for the "progressive" interventionist state. When government is big, the well-connected always have an advantage over the rest of us in influencing public...]]> Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 I keep reading about health-care "reform," but I have yet to see anyone explain how the government can make it easier for more people to obtain medical services, control the already exploding cost of those services and not interfere with people's most intimate decisions.

You don't need to be a Ph.D. in economics to understand that government cannot do all three things. (Judging by what Paul Krugman writes, a Ph.D. may be an obstacle.)

The New York Times describes a key part of the House bill: "Lawmakers of both parties agree on the need to rein in private insurance companies by banning...]]> Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The media are never better at displaying their economic illiteracy than when they report on the minimum wage.

"Workers got a raise on Friday when the federal minimum wage was hiked 70 cents to $7.25 an hour," the Christian Science Monitor reported last week. "They'll be shouting, "Olé!".

They assume that if politicians declare that workers should get a raise, they will actually get it. But the idea that government can increase wages by decree with only good consequences rests on a serious economic fallacy: that employers set wages arbitrarily. If wages are very low, it must be that employers are stingy.

Actually,...]]> Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 It's crazy for a group of mere mortals to try to design 15 percent of the U.S. economy. It's even crazier to do it by August.

Yet that is what some members of Congress presume to do. They intend, as the New York Times puts it, "to reinvent the nation's health care system".

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

Politicians and bureaucrats clearly have no idea how complicated markets are. Every day people make countless tradeoffs, in all areas of life, based on subjective value judgments and personal information as they...]]> Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The statist establishment would love a single-payer health-care system like Canada's if it were politically achievable. Barack Obama said that if we were starting from scratch, single payer is what he'd back. But, thankfully, Americans are still libertarian enough to cringe at turning the medical system entirely over to government.

So with single payer out of reach, the fans of government control have grabbed for second best: the "public option." This would be government-run health insurance that would "compete" with private insurance.
(It wouldn't compete fairly because it could do something no private firm can do: milk the captive taxpayers.) But the public option is...]]> Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Health care "reformers" keep talking about getting us more health insurance. Then they talk about cutting costs. This is contradictory nonsense.

Insurance, whether private or a government Ponzi scheme like Medicare, means third parties pay the bills. When someone else pays, costs always go up.

Imagine if you had grocery insurance. You wouldn't care how much food cost. Why shop around? If someone else were paying 80 percent, you'd buy the most expensive cuts of meat. Prices would skyrocket.

That's what health insurance does to medical care. Patients rarely even ask what anything costs. Doctors often don't know. Often nobody even...]]> Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 President Obama says government will make health care cheaper and better. But there's no free lunch.

In England, health care is "free" -- as long as you don't mind waiting. People wait so long for dentist appointments that some pull their own teeth. At any one time, half a million people are waiting to get into a British hospital. A British paper reports that one hospital tried to save money by not changing bedsheets. Instead of washing sheets, the staff was encouraged to just turn...]]> Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 President Obama has (http://tinyurl.com/mdemnc) announced his "sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system."

We can debate endlessly whether the Constitution authorizes any president to "overhaul" the financial system. But I want to focus on a different matter: whether any president, with all his advisers, is capable of overseeing something as complex as the financial system.

My answer is no, and it is ominous that a bright guy like Obama doesn't know this. He thinks he must regulate the system because it is so complicated and important. In fact, those are the reasons why he cannot regulate it, and should...]]> Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Few of us had heard of Glenn Beck a few years ago. Now the conservative talk-jock is everywhere. His radio show reaches eight million people. He's performing live before sold-out crowds on a comedy tour.

He's had No. 1 bestsellers in both fiction and nonfiction -- plus a new book, "Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government" came out this week.

And now he's host of his own Fox News show, which, even though it airs in the ratings desert of late afternoon, has a bigger audience than every show on the other cable news channels.

Why is he so popular? Beck says it's because he really believes what he says. I don't...]]> Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Competition so regularly brings us better stuff -- cars, phones, shoes, medicine -- that we've come to expect it. We complain on the rare occasion the supermarket doesn't carry a particular ice-cream flavor. We just assume the store will have 30,000 items, that it will be open 24/7, and that the food will be fresh and cheap.

I take it for granted that I can go to a foreign country, hand a piece of plastic to a total stranger who doesn't speak English ... and he'll rent me a car for a week. Later, Visa or MasterCard will have the accounting correct to the penny.

Compare: Governments can't even count votes accurately -- or deliver the mail efficiently.

Yet now,...]]> Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 I have something to say to all those people who take dumb risks and then expect the rest of us to pick up the tab: Pay for your own stupid mistakes.

Almost every day rescuers save someone somewhere in America.

Sometimes rescuers put their own lives on the line. When climbers on Mt. Hood fell into a crevasse, a military helicopter flew to the rescue. The copter crashed, and the pilot had to be rescued.

Often the rescued are in trouble simply because they took foolish risks.

"I fell down the hill. I really don't know what happened, but luckily, I got stopped by a tree before I fell off," one inebriated-looking man said on my special " Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Sales consultant Holly Waters says she was a top performer for the drug maker Novartis. But when she was about go on maternity leave, she was fired.

"I was seven-and-a-half months pregnant. There was no way I was going to be able to go out and find a job at this point," she told me for my ABC special "You Can't Even Talk About It" (http://tinyurl.com/dkgqbp).

Waters knew the law is on her side. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act makes it illegal to fire, or not hire, a woman because she is pregnant.

The law even restricts workplace speech. Employers are warned that in a job interview they must never ask questions like, "Might you...]]> Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Isn't it high time America did less for the elderly? A politically incorrect question for sure. But Medicare has an astounding $34-trillion unfunded liability. And because of rising unemployment, its hospital-stay program will go broke two years earlier than previously predicted.

For my recent ABC special "You Can't Even Talk About It", I spoke with residents of La Posada, a development in Florida that made Forbes's list of top 10 "ritzy" retirement communities. These folks are well off. And they get a bonus: You pay for...]]> Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In India, China and Russia, there were once 100,000 wild tigers. Today, only a few thousand survive.

They've disappeared because poachers kill them to sell crushed tiger bone, which is made into a paste that is supposed to kill pain.

The usual solution is to ban the sale of these products. Actor Harrison Ford says in a public-service announcement, "When the buying stops, the killing can, too. Case closed!"

But the case isn't closed. The ban is 33 years old, yet the tigers still disappear.

"If we continue the current approach, ... the tiger is doomed," Terry Anderson of PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center ( Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 With the return of baseball and a new book on Alex Rodriguez released this week, a fresh round of congressional posturing about steroids is upon us.

Why is it Congress's business?

I asked U.S. Reps. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., about that for my next TV special, "Don't Even Think about Saying That!," which will air this Friday on ABC.

"This is part of our duty," Cummings says, "to protect the American people." Steroids are "a serious public-health problem."

Stearns added, "Teenagers commit suicide."

And Congress will fix it all.

Of course, people like Dr. Gary Wadler testify in Congress that steroids do horrible...]]> Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "Rate hikes and late fee traps have to end. No more fine print, no more confusing terms and conditions", said President Obama last week when advocating another big-government solution -- this time to evils committed by credit-card companies.

Credit cards are a demagogue's dream come true. What better way to win public affection than to rail against banks for their harsh terms? In the politicians' morality play, creditors are the villains and debtors their helpless victims.

A little context first: No one has a natural right to a credit card. Someone has to be willing to undertake the risk in issuing it. Banks issue cards in their quest...]]> Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Visiting Mexico last week, President Obama said he will fight drug violence: "I will not pretend that this is Mexico's responsibility alone. The demand for these drugs inside the United States is keeping these cartels in business".

I don't expect politicians to be sticklers for logic, but this is ridiculous. Americans also have a hefty demand for Mexican beer, but there are no "Mexican beer cartels." When Obama visits France, he doesn't consult with politicians about "wine violence." What's happening on the Mexican border is prohibition-caused violence.

A legal product is produced and traded openly, and is therefore subject to...]]> Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The Obama administration says it will propose immigration reform next month.

    I wonder what they'll do.

    As a libertarian, I'm for open borders. But America has become a welfare state, and as Milton Friedman pointed out, you can't have open borders and a welfare state. Terrorism provides another reason. We can't have open borders when some people want to kill us.

    So what should be done?

    "Put troops with guns here." Says Robert "Little Dog" Crooks, a self-appointed border policeman. Crooks leads the Mountain Minutemen, a vigilante group that tries...]]> Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Mia Levi has. She told me, "This whole thing is a scam."

Levi runs six preschools. I thought she'd favor the program, since she'd collect easy money from the government.

"I don't want to have to answer to the government," she said in my ABC special "Bailouts and Bull". "Our programs are so far superior."

Universal pre-K would create a single standard for preschools, but why is that a good thing? Why should we think there is one way to do preschool and that government experts know what it is? President Obama doesn't acknowledge what Nobel economist F. A. Hayek taught us: Competition...]]> Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 It's happening. Private road builders are doing it. They built a double-decker underground highway in Paris. A 45-minute trip now takes 10 minutes. Three hundred-fifty cameras watch for traffic delays or accidents. Once the camera detects a problem, a crew rushes to tow the obstacle away so traffic keeps moving.

They did a similar thing in California, too, on Highway 91. Instead of building a brand-new road, a private developer added two lanes in the median strip of an existing highway. The beauty of it: Unlike government work, the private highway is all voluntary. No driver or taxpayer was forced to pay for the extra lanes. Drivers can choose to use them or...]]> Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) seized 30 pounds of marijuana. Sheriff Pat Hedges said the facts were clear, "Charlie Lynch was making a profit off of selling marijuana."

It wasn't hard for the authorities to locate Lynch's marijuana operation. They were probably tipped off by the public ribbon-cutting ceremony Lynch held -- the one that the mayor of his town attended, along with city councilmen and the president of the Chamber of Commerce. The police were invited, too.

You see, Lynch sold medical marijuana, which has been declared legal by California and 12 other states. California says if a doctor recommends that you use...]]> Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 And author Barbara Ehrenreich won fame by claiming that it's almost impossible for an entry-level worker to make it in America. She wrote "Nickel and Dimed," a book that describes her failure to "make it" working in entry-level jobs. Her book is now required reading in thousands of high schools and colleges. I spoke to her for my ABC special "Bailouts, Big Spending and Bull".

"I worked as a waitress and an aide in a nursing home and a cleaning lady and a Wal-Mart associate. And that didn't do it."

If you do a good job, can't you move up?

"That's not easy. Wal-Mart capped the maximum...]]> Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If someone expresses skepticism, Obama and other political leaders suggest that economists are unanimous in believing that government spending is the only answer.

"We have a consensus that we need a big stimulus package that will jolt the economy back into shape," Obama said.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer agreed: "Every economist from right to left, Republican, Democrat, advises that it has to be a very substantial package."

It's a lie. There was no consensus. (Anyway, a consensus doesn't mean something is true.) Finding an economist who opposed government spending as a way to fix the economy was easy. More than 350...]]> Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0600 And he's making progress.

"[W]e have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade."

How will he do it? Here's an example: "Agriculture Secretary Vilsack is saving nearly $20 million with reforms to modernize programs and streamline bureaucracy".

Amazing! "Modernize and streamline." It is indeed a new day.

Though he says he wants better not bigger government, Obama plans to spend a lot more money -- on medical reform, education, energy, etc. He also promises to halve the deficit by the end of his term. (Presumptuously he says, "first term.")

This is dangerous...]]> Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 If the gain is in the private sector, Obama's boosters will claim credit on the basis of the "multiplier effect." It's a favorite theory of politicians and their court economists that government spending has a bigger economic jolt than cutting marginal tax rates does. But not everyone is so sure. (Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw, for one.

The bottom line is that a lower unemployment rate will not prove that Obama's "stimulus" worked.

Given time, the economy, unless totally crippled by government intervention, will regenerate itself. That's because an economy is not a machine that needs jumpstarting....]]> Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Its economic significance was not lost on that great advocate of full employment through public works, John Maynard Keynes. The British economist, so in vogue today, famously wrote in "The General Theory" (1936), "Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth".

In fact, pyramids are even better than the usual government project. Keynes said: "Two pyramids . . . are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York."

Ancient Egypt's success has many applications today. We could have full employment overnight if the government simply outlawed machines. Today's 7...]]> Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 But some members of his party were elected on protectionist platforms, and they are not about to blow this chance to reward their union and industrial constituencies. What was Obama to do?

He did what old-style politicians always do: tried to have it both ways by resorting to vague rhetoric. He said he'd "see what kind of language we can work on this issue".

The Senate then added a line saying that the "Buy American" section must be "applied in a manner consistent with U.S. obligations under international agreements".

So is the bill protectionist or...]]> Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks that hundreds of millions of dollars for family-planning services will stimulate the economy. My colleague George Stephanopoulos of "This Week" was incredulous. But Pelosi was ready for him: "Well, the family planning services reduce cost. ... The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now. ... [C]ontraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government" (http://tinyurl.com/dgqtjh).

Fortunately, the White House saw that as a stretch and distanced itself from Pelosi. "The principles of what he [President Obama] thought should be in the package -- that wasn't part...]]>