John Stossel Quotes
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As coercive monopolies that spend other people's money taken by force, governments are uniquely unqualified to solve problems. They are riddled by ignorance, perverse incentives, incompetence and are self-serving.
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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.
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Give me a break - They say taxes are inevitable, like death. At least death doesn't come every year.
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Good government has to mean less government.
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We have all kinds of government compensation systems that are much more efficient than the lawyers.
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Well, who is more likely to volunteer to take a job in a bureaucracy that has little to recommend it except that it gives you the power to use government force to control the lives of others? A dispassionate scientist or a zealot? In government, the zealots eventually take over.
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The smaller the government, the less the need to manipulate politicians.
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The one thing I've learned is that stuttering in public is never as bad as I fear it will be.
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People acting in their own self-interest is the fuel for all the discovery, innovation, and prosperity that powers the world.
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The happiest stutterers, I learned, are those who are willing to stutter in front of others.
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There's no business that's too small for government to torture
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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.'
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I was a closet stutterer.
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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.
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Asking someone in the media about liberal bias is like asking a fish about water. 'Huh, what are you talking about? Where is it?'
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Private businesses ought to get to discriminate.
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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.
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Why, in our "free" country, do Americans meekly stand aside and let the state limit our choices, even when we are dying?
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Liberalism had come to mean spending more on everything-speech police, failed poverty programs that reward dependence, a bigger nanny state telling us we cannot eat fatty foods, workplace roles that stifle opportunity, and absurd environmental regulations.
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Patrick Henry did not say, 'Give me absolutely safety or give me death.' America is supposed to be about freedom.
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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.
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The welfare state has done to Black Americans what slavery (and Jim Crow and racism) could not have done. . .break up the black family. Today, just slightly over 30 percent of black kids live in two-parent families. Historically, from the 1870s on. . . 75-90 percent of black kids lived in two-parent families.
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Government is so big today that more than half the population gets a major part of its income from the state.
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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.
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Freedom works, and government, when it grows beyond the barest minimum, keeps people poor.
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You can either invade a country or leave them alone and trade with them. When goods cross borders, armies don't.
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..the real world's all we've got. Believers in the supernatural claim to have special wisdom about the world. But real wisdom means knowing truth from falsehood, knowing the difference between evidence and wishful thinking. Yes, the real world is mysterious and sometimes frightening. But would the supernatural make it better? The real world has beauty, poetry, love and the joy of honest discovery. Isn't that enough?
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Saying that government is not the way to solve problems is not saying that humanity cannot solve its problems. What I've finally learned is this: Despite the obstacles created by governments, voluntary networks of private individuals - through voluntary exchange - solve all sorts of challenges.
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Many people are priced out of the medical and insurance markets for one reason: the politicians refusal to give up power. Allowing them to seize another 16 percent of the economy won't solve our problems. Freedom will.
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As a free person, I ought to be allowed if I'm dying to take something.
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