Stossel Quotes

People who suffer from anxiety are very good at hiding it. That can often be a contributor to the anxiety because the gap between the internal perception and the external impression can feel so large. ~ Scott Stossel

Living with the liberals, you get to hear their arguments, fight with them all the time. Keeps me alert. ~ John Stossel

Current government regulation interferes with honest voluntary exchanges by imposing arbitrary terms and requiring tons of paperwork disclosing information no one wants anyway. ~ John Stossel

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. ~ John Stossel

People acting in their own self-interest is the fuel for all the discovery, innovation, and prosperity that powers the world. ~ John Stossel

As a free person, I ought to be allowed if I'm dying to take something. ~ John Stossel

Isn't allowing people a choice what America is all about? ~ John Stossel

When entrepreneurs are free to compete, they grow the pie so that everyone's share gets larger. ~ John Stossel

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. ~ John Stossel

There's a vast encyclopedia of fears and phobias, and pretty much any object, experience, situation you can think of, there is someone who has a phobia of it. ~ Scott Stossel

All the textbooks talk about avoidance as a classic hallmark of anxiety disorder. So you need a therapist who is sympathetic and understanding but will also push you to do precisely the things that scare you. ~ Scott Stossel

The people who tried government regulation have lives which are miserable. ~ John Stossel

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. ~ John Stossel

for the existentialists, what generated anxiety was not the godlessness of the world, per se, but rather the freedom to choose between God and godlessness. Though freedom is something we actively seek, the freedom to choose generates anxiety. "When I behold my possibilities," Kierkegaard wrote, "I experience that dread which is the dizziness of freedom, and my choice is made in fear and trembling." Many people try to flee anxiety by fleeing choice. This helps explain the perverse-seeming appeal of authoritarian societies - the certainties of a rigid, choiceless society can be very reassuring - and why times of upheaval so often produce extremist leaders and movements: Hitler in Weimar Germany, Father Coughlin in Depression-era America, or Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Vladimir Putin in Russia today. But running from anxiety, Kierkegaard believed, was a mistake because anxiety was a "school" that taught people to come to terms with the human condition. ~ Scott Stossel

That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. ~ John Stossel No They Can T

A group called the Food Research and Action Center wants the government to spend more on food programs. Sure enough, their study found that astonishing numbers of children were 'hungry': 'One in four American children under age 12 is hungry or at risk of hunger in America.'
The report got lots of press. Some reporters spun the report so it sounded worse than it was. Dan Rather somehow changed kids who were 'sometimes hungry' into 'children in danger of starving.'
Starving? The Food Research and Action Center never counted calories. They didn't even ask people what they ate. Instead, they asked: 'Do you ever cut the size of meals?' 'Do you ever eat less than you feel you should?' Naturally, some people said yes to those questions. It didn't mean America is 'hungry', let alone 'starving.' In fact, in America, one of the poor's biggest problems is obesity. ~ John Stossel

A system that rewards politicians skilled at campaigning - which is the art of creating an illusion - and that puts hundreds of billions of coerced taxpayer dollars at the disposal of the winners will tend to attract men and women with a comparative advantage in manipulation. ~ John Stossel

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. ~ John Stossel

The truth is that anxiety is at once a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture. ~ Scott Stossel

For the social phobic, any kind of performance - musical, sporting, public speaking - can be terrifying because failure will reveal the weakness and inadequacy within. This in turn means constantly projecting an image that feels false - an image of confidence, competence, even perfection. ~ Scott Stossel

As recently as 1979, neither panic attacks nor panic disorder officially existed. ~ Scott Stossel

The happiest stutterers, I learned, are those who are willing to stutter in front of others. ~ John Stossel

Life is fairer when individuals are free to make their own decisions ~ John Stossel No They Can T

He 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? ~ John Stossel

Natural gas is highly explosive, invisible, poisonous, and odorless. Yet we accept natural gas, even though it kills not two but 400 Americans a year, because it was introduced before we got crazy about risk. We accept coal, even though mining it is nasty and filthy and kills dozens of people every year. By contrast, we're terrified of nuclear energy. Chernobyl, the worst nuclear power disaster ever, killed only 30 people. Some say the radiation may eventually kill others, but even if that's true, natural gas kills more people every year. ~ John Stossel

It is an irony of medical history that even as Freud's later work would make him the progenitor of modern psychodynamic psychotherapy, which is generally premised on the idea that mental illness arises from unconscious psychological conflicts, his papers on cocaine make him one of the fathers of biological psychiatry, which is governed by the notion that mental distress is partly caused by a physical or chemical malfunction that can be treated with drugs. ~ Scott Stossel

Where I live in Manhattan and where I work at ABC, people say 'conservative' the way people say 'child molester.' ~ John Stossel

To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them. ~ Scott Stossel

All our rights are gradually eroded as government gets bigger. ~ John Stossel

The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the 1950s.") ~ Scott Stossel

Happiness comes when we test our skills towards some meaningful purpose. ~ John Stossel

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. ~ John Stossel

I started out by viewing the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market. ~ John Stossel

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. ~ John Stossel

I never wanted to be an anchor for 25 years, and suddenly I wanted to be one. ~ John Stossel

Good government has to mean less government. ~ John Stossel No They Can T

Private businesses ought to get to discriminate. ~ John Stossel

When action is divorced from consequences, no one is happy with the ultimate outcome. 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. Soon, the pot is empty and will not be refilled -- a bad situation even for the earlier takers. ~ John Stossel

There's no business that's too small for government to torture ~ John Stossel

Asking someone in the media about liberal bias is like asking a fish about water. 'Huh, what are you talking about? Where is it?' ~ John Stossel

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. ~ John Stossel

I was ashamed for people to see me struggle. ~ John Stossel

Companies don't get rich hurting their customers. ~ John Stossel

Many nights, I would begin the evening fueled by caffeine and nicotine, which I needed to propel me out of torpor and hopelessness - only to overshoot into quaking, quivering anxiety. ~ Scott Stossel

We have all kinds of government compensation systems that are much more efficient than the lawyers. ~ John Stossel

To grapple with and understand anxiety is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition. ~ Scott Stossel

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. ~ John Stossel

To finance 'entitlement' programs, the government threatens force against the taxpayers who provide the money. Why are people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy? ~ John Stossel

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 judgements and personal information as they delicately balance their interest, needs and wants. Who is in a better position than they to tailor those choices to best serve their purposes? Yet the politicians believe they can plan the medical market the way you plan a birthday party. ~ John Stossel

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. ~ John Stossel

But none of these treatments have fundamentally reduced the underlying anxiety that seems woven into my soul and hardwired into my body and that at times makes my life a misery. As the years pass, the hope of being cured of my anxiety has faded into a resigned desire to come to terms with it, to find some redemptive quality or mitigating benefit to my being, too often, a quivering, quaking, neurotic wreck. ~ Scott Stossel

I have, since the age of about 2, been a twitchy bundle of phobias, fears, and neuroses. And I have, since the age of 10, when I was first taken to a mental hospital for evaluation and then referred to a psychiatrist for treatment, tried in various ways to overcome my anxiety. ~ Scott Stossel

We began the show by asking: Who did more for the world, Michael Milken or Mother Teresa?
This seems like a no-brainer. Milken is the greedy junk-bond king. One year, his firm paid him $550 million. Then he went to jail for breaking securities laws. Mother Teresa is the nun who spent her lifetime helping the poor and died without a penny. Her good deeds live on even after her death; several thousand sisters now continue the charities she began. At first glance, of course Mother Teresa did more for the world.
But it's not so simple. Milken's selfish pursuit of profit helped a lot of people, too. Think about it: By pioneering a new way for companies to raise money, Milken created millions of jobs. The ignorant media sneered at 'junk bonds', but Milken's innovative use of them meant exciting new ideas flourished.
We now make calls on a national cellular network established by a company called McCaw Cellular, which Milken financed. And our calls are cheaper because Milken's junk bonds financed MCI. CEO Bill McGowan simply couldn't get the money anywhere else. Without Milken, MCI wouldn't have grown from 11 to 50,000 employees. CNN's 24-hour news and Ted Turner's other left-wing ventures were made possible by Milken's 'junk'.
The world's biggest toy company, Mattel, the cosmetics company Revlon, and the supermarket giant Safeway were among many rescued from bankruptcy by Milken's junk bonds. He financed more than 3,000 companies, including what are now Barnes & ~ John Stossel

Hugh Grant, who several times has announced that he was thinking of retiring from acting, has said that he suffers from panic attacks when the cameras start rolling. ~ Scott Stossel

The war on drugs is what makes thugs. ~ John McWhorter

During high school, I would purposely lose tennis and squash matches to escape the agony of anxiety that competitive situations would provoke in me. ~ Scott Stossel

You can either invade a country or leave them alone and trade with them. When goods cross borders, armies don't. ~ John Stossel

People like getting what they think is free stuff from government. ~ John Stossel

Even though my mom herself was anxious, I think she didn't know how to deal with it in her kid, and my dad just had no conception of what this was about, and sort of didn't even want to acknowledge it. ~ Scott Stossel

Cornelius Vanderbilt and his fellow tycoon John D. Rockefeller were often called 'robber barons'. Newspapers said they were evil, and ran cartoons showing Vanderbilt as a leech sucking the blood of the poor. Rockefeller was depicted as a snake. What the newspapers printed stuck--we still think of Vanderbilt and Rockefeller as 'robber barons'. But it was a lie. They were neither robbers nor barons. They weren't robbers, because they didn't steal from anyone, and they weren't barons--they were born poor.
Vanderbilt got rich by pleasing people. He invented ways to make travel and shipping things cheaper. He used bigger ships, faster ships, served food onboard. People liked that. And the extra volume of business he attracted allowed him to lower costs. He cut the New York--Hartford fare from $8 to $1. That gave consumers more than any 'consumer group' ever has.
It's telling that the 'robber baron' name-calling didn't come from consumers. It was competing businessmen who complained, and persuaded the media to join in.
Rockefeller got rich selling oil. First competitors and then the government called him a monopolist, but he wasn't--he had competitors. No one was forced to buy his oil. Rockefeller enticed people to buy it by selling it for less. That's what his competitors hated. He found cheaper ways to get oil from the ground to the gas pump. This made life better for millions. Working-class people, who used to go to bed when it got dark, could suddenly afford fuel ~ John Stossel

I don't want to be in a position that could make me vomit, like air travel. I've purloined airsick bags and stuffed them everywhere, just in case I ever feel the need to throw up. I haven't vomited since 1977, but I think about it all the time. I recognize that it's irrational, but I'd rather jump out of a window than vomit. ~ Scott Stossel

A conservative is a libertarian who has been mugged. ~ John Stossel

When America began, government cost every citizen $20 (in [2003] money) per year. Taxes rose during wars, but for most of the life of America, spending never exceeded a few hundred dollars per person. During World War II, government got much bigger. It was supposed to shrink again after the war but never did. Instead, it just kept growing. Now the federal government costs every man, woman, and child an average of $10,000 per year. ~ John Stossel

A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system. ~ John Stossel

Nothing keeps a company honest and efficient like the threat of other companies coming along and taking its business away. ~ John Stossel

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. ~ John Stossel

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. ~ John Stossel

Government has no money of its own. All it does is take resources from one group and given them to another. ~ John Stossel

It is a fact - I say this from experience - that being severely anxious is depressing. Anxiety can impede your relationships, impair your performance, constrict your life, and limit your possibilities. ~ Scott Stossel

Individuals who rate high on the so-called Anxiety Sensitivity Index, or ASI, have a high degree of what's known as interoceptive awareness, meaning they are highly attuned to the inner workings on their bodies, to the beepings and bleatings, the blips and burps, of their physiologies; they are more conscious of their heart rate, blood pressure, digestive burblings, and so forth than other people are. ~ Scott Stossel

I had no trouble with strangers finding out about my anxiety. It was my friends and colleagues I was concerned about. ~ Scott Stossel

I am living on the razor's edge between success and failure, adulation and humiliation - between justifying my existence and revealing my unworthiness to be alive. ~ Scott Stossel

If government were less important in our lives, politicians would have fewer goodies to trade. In return, we'd have more money and more freedom. ~ John Stossel

I like taking the subway to work. ~ John Stossel

David Boaz has been my guide to the history, economics, and politics of freedom for years. ~ John Stossel

I've always been interested in intellectual history and in psychology, and anxiety is obviously something that's been a big part of my life. ~ Scott Stossel

Some social phobics find even positive attention to be aversive. Think of the young child who bursts into tears when guests sing "Happy Birthday" to her at a party - or of Elfriede Jelinek afraid to pick up her Nobel Prize. Social attention - even positive, supportive attention - activates the neurocircuitry of fear. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Calling positive attention to yourself can incite jealousy or generate new rivalries. ~ Scott Stossel

The market performs miracles so routinely that we take it for granted. Supermarkets provide 30,000 choices at rock-bottom prices. We take it for granted that when we stick a piece of plastic in a wall, cash will come out; that when we give the same plastic to a stranger, he will rent us a car, and the next month, VISA will have the accounting correct to the penny. By contrast, 'experts' in government can't even count the vote accurately. ~ John Stossel

If overpopulation or lack of resources created poverty, then Hong Kong should be poor. Hong Kong has 20 times as many people per square mile as India, and no valuable natural resources. Yet Hong Kong is rich; the average income there is higher than in Great Britain or Canada. This is a recent development. In the 1920s, Hong Kong was as poor as India. But in a relatively short time it became rich because of one key ingredient: economic freedom. ~ John Stossel

When I was a kid, my mother thought spinach was the healthiest food in the world because it contained so much iron. Getting enough iron was a big deal then because we didn't have 'iron-fortified' bread. Turns out that spinach is an okay source of iron, but no better than pizza, pistachio nuts, cooked lentils, or dried peaches. The spinach-iron myth grew out of a simple mathematical miscalculation: A researcher accidentally moved a decimal point one space, so he thought spinach had 10 times more iron than it did. The press reported it, and I had to eat spinach.
Moving the decimal point was an honest mistake--but it's seldom that simple. If it happened today I'd suspect a spinach lobby was behind it. Businesses often twist science to make money. Lawyers do it to win cases. Political activists distort science to fit their agenda, bureaucrats to protect their turf. Reporters keep falling for it.
Scientists sometimes go along with it because they like being famous. ~ John Stossel

Barbra Streisand developed overwhelming performance anxiety at the height of her career; for 27 years she refused to perform for the general public, appearing live only in private clubs and at charity events, where she presumably believed the pressure on her was less intense. ~ Scott Stossel

We like to think we're superior to the people who, centuries ago, burned 'witches' for no better reason than a neighbor's belief that his crop failure or impotence was caused by that woman's action. But reporters are still prone to the same mental errors that caused these killings: seeing patterns where there are none, finding causes where there is only coincidence, ignoring our sources' political agendas and turning scanty evidence into panic. ~ John Stossel

Paul Tillich, a theologian who grew up in Weimar Germany, similarly explained the rise of Nazism as a response to anxiety. "First of all a feeling of fear or, more exactly, of indefinite anxiety was prevailing," he writes of 1930s Germany. "Not only the economic and political, but also the cultural and religious, security seemed to be lost. There was nothing on which one could build; everything was without foundation. A catastrophic breakdown was expected every moment. Consequently, a longing for security was growing in everybody. A freedom that leads to fear and anxiety has lost its value; better authority with security than freedom with fear. ~ Scott Stossel

[T]he only way to shrink the trade deficit is for the government to prohibit us from buying whatever we want. ~ John Stossel

On September 11, it was government that failed. Law enforcement agencies didn't detect the plot. The FBI had reports that said young men on the terrorist watch list were going from flight school to flight school, trying to find an instructor who would teach them how to fly a commercial jet. But the FBI never acted on it. The INS let the hijackers in. Three of them had expired visas. Months after the attack, the government issued visas to two dead hijackers.
The solution to such government incompetence is to give the government more power?
Congress could have done what Amsterdam, Belfast, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, London, Paris, and Rome did: set tough standards and let private companies compete to meet them. Many of those cities switched to private companies because they realized government-run security wasn't working very well. Private-sector competition keeps the screeners alert because the airport can fire them. No one can fire the government; that's a reason government agencies gradually deteriorate. There's no competition. ~ John Stossel

Most people are oblivious to F.A. Hayek's insight that the critical information needed to run an economy - or even 15 percent of one - doesn't exist in any one place where it is accessible to central planners. Instead, it is scattered piecemeal among millions of people. All those people put together are far wiser and better informed than Congress could ever be. Only markets - private property, free exchange and the price system - can put this knowledge at the disposal of entrepreneurs and consumers, ensuring the system will serve the people and not just the political class. ~ John Stossel

No transaction happens unless it is voluntary. It only happens if both of you think you win. ~ John Stossel

Take away the government's monopoly, and private groups will do it better. ~ John Stossel

The one thing I've learned is that stuttering in public is never as bad as I fear it will be. ~ John Stossel

Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else's money? ~ John Stossel

There is an element in which anxiety co-represents with aspects of my personality I wouldn't want to give up. It allows you to have foresight. I may not be as empathetic. It's hard to figure out the difference between pathology and personality. ~ Scott Stossel

Even as economic and political freedoms have advanced enormously and generated huge benefits for humanity, they've also created a great deal of anxiety because every time you have to make a choice, there's anxiety about making the wrong one. ~ Scott Stossel

One of the biggest health problems facing America's poor is obesity. You know you live in a good place when overeating is a problem.
Most of the 6 billion people in the world live short, brutal, miserable lives; 1 billion people try to survive on just a dollar a day. They would love to have the lifestyle of America's poor. Ninety-seven percent of American families our government classifies as 'poor' have color televisions and half own two. Seventy-five percent of poor people have cars and nearly half own their own homes. ~ John Stossel

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. ~ John Stossel

There are lots of things, including changing the kind of inner dialog, that can mitigate anxiety. And yes, there are people who have the glass half full and glass half empty, and I'm afraid the glass is going to break and I'll cut myself on the shards. ~ Scott Stossel

I was a closet stutterer. ~ John Stossel

To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I'm like a duck
paddling, paddling, paddling. ~ Scott Stossel