Is The Libertarian Moment Over? With Special Guest John Stossel
Legendary libertarian journalist and advocate John Stossel joins today's Liberty Report to look at the future of the liberty movement in the age of Trump. War powers, regulation, government spending, the media - we cover all bases!
Legendary libertarian journalist and advocate John Stossel joins today's Liberty Report to look at the future of the liberty movement in the age of Trump. War powers, regulation, government spending, the media - we cover all bases!
Legendary libertarian journalist and advocate John Stossel joins today's Liberty Report to look at the future of the liberty movement in the age of Trump. War powers, regulation, government spending, the media - we cover all bases!
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you here today.
Here this morning, Dr. Pohl.
Good, and we have a very neat program today.
A very special guest, somebody I've known for a good many years.
He's way better known than I am because he's been working as a libertarian.
He snuck in, you know, many years ago on ABC before libertarianism was cool.
So that is our friend John Stossel.
John, welcome to our program.
Thank you.
I'm delighted to hear that libertarianism is cool.
I do want to ask you a few things about where you've been in the libertarian movement.
I know you were at ABC for a long time.
That's when I first got to know about you.
And I always thought, wow, this is something else.
Somebody there presenting these views.
That probably were in the latter years of you being at ABC.
But I thought it was very exciting that you could have a position like that.
And of course, you were with Fox for a long time, too.
But you've been out, I guess, out of Fox now for about a year.
But I'm sure you've seen some of these articles.
There was a major article in The Atlantic not too long ago about the libertarian moment.
And from your perspective, you've really sort of witnessed this from sort of outside, moving over, being involved, and now still being very much involved.
And they would like to paint those of us who are interested in the libertarian message, and you've been involved in a long time, and saying, well, we've had our day.
You know, Ron had a pretty good campaign, but nobody cares anymore.
And how do you analyze that?
Do you think the libertarian moment is over?
Are we in the doldrums, or do you consider it alive and well?
We are in the doldrums.
My nephew's the editor of The Atlantic, and I think since then they have laughed at that libertarian moment story because there was great hope that when people hated both Hillary and Donald Trump, that people would vote libertarian, but it just didn't happen.
And also, as someone like I'm a former leftist, a consumer reporter who reported on that day after day and finally woke up and saw how that the regulations the so-called consumer activists were calling for made things worse, not better.
I read Beason Magazine, Bilton Friedman, discovered you, this congressman from somewhere in the boondocks of Texas, learned more about libertarianism and became this born-again free marketer.
And once I got it, it was such an epiphany that I thought naively that if I just explain this to people, do it simply on television, they too will see the.
But I can barely even influence my wife after 35 years of marriage.
And there are just some people who don't get it, and I don't know why, because your ideas are better.
Daniel.
Well, John, you know, I was one of those young people you were trying to influence.
I remember growing up when you were doing 2020, and I had never heard the word libertarianism.
But I listened to your segments and I got a very simple message.
The government screws up everything it does.
It's no good.
And it ended the state worship.
My family, we all sit in front of the TV and watch you do your segments.
We'd all, you know, applaud afterward.
We never thought of ourselves as libertarian, but it planted an important seed, which is the government is not God.
In fact, it's the opposite.
you reach millions and millions of people but what I was going to ask you actually is about let me just let me just comment on that And thank you for saying that.
And it makes me feel good to know there were some people who I reached and who got it.
But because of stupid government rules, there were only three or four networks.
And so I had this huge audience, 12, 15 billion people sometimes on 2020 or in the Stassel specials.
And so thanks to bad government regulation, I have to reach a lot of people.
That's pretty neat.
I was just going to ask about the media because you made your career really challenging conventional wisdom and really particularly challenging conventionalism as conveyed by the mainstream media.
Do you think the mainstream media has gotten more complacent when it comes to challenging what the government tells us?
Or do you think they're getting better?
It's hard to say.
Some are worse, some are better.
It's just when you hear a reporter and you've got a story today, the instinct is, who do I call?
And you can call the mayor or the police chief, someone in government, centrally located.
But to see the thousands of entrepreneurs who might be hurt a little by the rule they're proposing, you'd have to make a thousand phone calls, and they probably wouldn't want to talk to you anyway.
It's much harder to cover real life than it is to just go to the government and get a statement.
And then you get to be friendly with them and indebted to your sources.
John, you've been involved in the consumer issues, and you talk about economics a whole lot.
And I'm sure you share our viewpoint that deficits are too high and they're going higher this year.
The deficit may be a trillion dollars.
But you have pointed out how regulations are so detrimental and painful and costly.
But one thing that we have talked about, it's in the area of foreign policy, and that has to do with some expenditures there.
How do you handle this issue on national defense?
At the same time, you can see some of the shortcomings of building an airplane like the F-35, which is a political thing.
And we witnessed that, and we witnessed the lobbyists and how it's built in 50 states.
Are you one there to say, hey, watch out?
There's some of the so-called expenditures in military that is every bit as detrimental as spending on regulations on our market economy.
Without War, Where's The Harm?00:08:44
Yes, and I, to Fox's credit, on my show on Fox, when I had that, they never put any pressure on me not to be critical of crazy military spending.
It's not my expertise.
And so in my new five-minute video, YouTube and Facebook videos, I have been doing that less, but we'll keep covering it.
It's also creepy that Trump is just sending troops to Nigeria and all these places without any discussion.
And it invites new blowback.
Daniel.
Yeah, the argument we saw for the troops in Syria was that the president has the imperative authority based on the fact that he's commander-in-chief.
It completely cuts Congress out of the deal.
It's incredible.
We didn't even know that we had troops in Niger when they were killed.
So that's a good point.
Now, John, you do a lot of work with young people, and I think it's very important.
You know, Dr. Paul also focuses on young people.
You do a program for young people.
What's trendy to say now is that young people are attracted to socialism.
They all love Bernie and this sort of thing.
Are you seeing this, or do you think this is just wishful thinking on their part?
Haven't young people always been turned on by this more fair socialism argument?
And certainly if they go to the elite universities, the Marxist professors indoctrinate this stuff.
Some of them will be mugged by reality once they try to build something.
As I make speeches, I notice that the people who really get it are home builders, people who try to start a little company, because they've run up against the regulatory state.
Most young people, they haven't done anything.
They just get a paycheck.
But wait until they try to remodel their garage and go up against the local zoning board.
People wake up as they get older.
And John, you, of course, have talked about the civil liberties of all Americans, and that sort of gets mixed up in foreign policy.
And in 2012, when I was campaigning, one of the things actually the college students brought to my attention or emphasized it, and that was the NDAA, and that was the ability of Obama then to arrest American citizens and hold them without trial.
Actually, he endorsed the principle of assassinating American citizens without charges being made.
And yet now they're getting ready.
Republican and Democrats are putting together to try to rein in some of this power, like they tried after a Vietnam War, which didn't work.
But they have this new bill called the Authority to Use Military Force, which is supposed to curtail some of this power.
And when you look at this, I don't know if you've had a chance to look at this, but it actually is expanding this and making it easier for the president to arrest and hold American citizens.
And it looks like they may be going to Guantanamo.
Do you have a comment about that?
I do not, I have not studied it, and I don't like to comment on what I haven't studied.
It's the same instinct as to regulate when there's some safety issue.
Somebody's hurt, we've got to pass a law.
Horrible events in Syria, we have to retaliate, teach them a lesson.
It's the natural instinct, and that's why government grows.
That's a great point.
You know, you've made your career telling us that government programs are inefficient, wasteful, and harmful.
And I think a lot of conservatives do get that.
They take that on board.
Certainly libertarians do.
The problem is that libertarians, they view what the government does internally as harmful and inefficient.
But how to convince them that what the government interventions overseas are the same government doing these interventions overseas that we don't want them to do at home?
That seems to be the brick wall that we often hit.
This terrible government that can't do anything right here, we somehow expect it to rebuild the world overseas.
Well, I do it by repeating some of the arguments I heard from Ron about blowback.
And don't we think when we bomb and kill the alleged terrorist in Afghanistan that all of his younger cousins and siblings are going to hate us and want to kill us even more?
And in 20 years, when they grow up, the bombs are going to be even more small and concealable.
And they present an even greater danger.
One of the advantages of working at Fox, where I still am an employee, by the way, and I appear on some of their programs, John Bolton was there, and we were friendly, and I called him a warmonger, and he would laugh, and we would sometimes have discussions about it.
And I would say, well, what about this blowback?
These people are going to want to come and kill us when we go into all these countries you want to go into.
And he would answer with these amazing answers.
Well, when I was in the cave with Sheikh so-and-so, and I was talking to Nixon and Clinton, and I would get lost in the fascinating stories.
And only later would I realize he didn't answer the question.
Right.
You know, I read someplace in the bio that you did have a position, at least I accused you of having a position, and that is that you disagree with the Iraq war, and it sounds like that's a reasonable place for you to be.
But why do you think that our leaders, the John Boltons of the world, never seem to learn these lessons?
They look at the failures.
There's so many failures.
And of course, I date it back from World War II when we used to have precise declarations and a precise enemy and a price ending point.
And yet it's this carelessness and the casualness of just totally ignoring the Constitution.
And of course, the work that you've done raises a constitutional issue, too, is how many of these regulations under the strict interpretation of the Constitution really is permissible because the regulations are coming from the executive branch of government, not from the legislative branch of government.
Well, you tell that story about executive versus legislative, and I think the people go to sleep.
They're just not interested.
It's too complicated.
And the lawyers can have endless fine-tooth discussions about, well, the Constitution actually means this or that.
Plus, people look at World War II and say, thank God for military force.
It was the right thing to do.
And they can find a grenade out and a couple other examples where maybe it was the right thing to do.
And when horrible people are doing horrible things, it's instinct to want to do something.
Daniel, do you have a closing question for?
Well, closed question.
You know, you've also made your career telling us that we don't need the government to regulate products and tell us which products are safe and which ones we should use or not.
It seems like there are so many people that feel like the companies would poison you or do something that kills you or harms you, the airplanes would crash if it wasn't for government out there protecting us.
But you pointed out that they've got a pretty bad record when it comes to protecting us anyway.
It's harder to get your brain around it.
I was stupid.
It took me too many years to see that the way you get really rich in a free society where there's competition is to serve your customers well.
And the plane, the airplane that is less safe, that airline is going to be punished.
In my last book, No, They Can't, making fun of Obama's yes, we can.
We looked at the meat rules because people said, you libertarians without government, meat companies would poison us.
But no, because they know if Purdue poisons somebody, they're going to go out of business.
And 90% of the washing their tables with 120-degree liquid and all the extra safety measures they take, they do because of their reputation, that they want to preserve that.
Reputation protects us much better than regulation.
John, we will be closing this down in a minute or two, but I did want to ask one question.
This is more curiosity than anything else, because it comes up a lot when people are interviewing me and talking to me or they want to badmouth me.
They'll bring up the name Ayn Rand and say, oh, you're just a Randy and you're just an objectivist and look at what she does.
Reputation Over Regulation00:01:38
Have you had that happen?
Or do you have an opinion of Ayn Rand?
I'm sure you've read some of her stuff and her influence on the libertarian movement.
I loved Atlas Shrugged.
I read it when I was 50 and it was an epiphany.
How could she have known about this stuff 60 years ago before it even happened?
But I try to understand objectivism.
I get lost.
I get lost in the fights among the objectivists versus this other Atlas group.
So people find a lot of stuff to criticize me about, but that one, not so much.
There you go.
Well, John, I want to thank you very much for being with us today.
I want to also thank you for presenting me with an achievement award.
That's pretty amazing.
John Stoffel giving me an award, and I thank you for that.
That was pretty neat.
And also, I wish you well in all that you're doing.
I'm sure we're going to hear from you.
You're way too young to retire, and you're not retiring.
And we don't want the libertarian movement to fade away.
And I still think it was pretty amazing what you did in ABC and reaching so many people.
That was astounding.
But a lot of people ask me, you know, when I give a talk, and it needs to be college kids, what do I do?
What am I supposed to do, you know, now?
And I said, do whatever you want to do.
And it looks like you've done what you thought you could do and what you were able to do.
And you've presented the case for less government.
And we think that's astounding.
But thank you, John, very much for being with us today.
Thank you for all you've done for us.
Well, very good.
And I want to thank our audience today for joining us for this special program.