John Stossel, co-anchor of ABC’s 20/20 and host of his own primetime special, spoke Monday at the Memorial Union Theater about the negative effect of government regulation.
Radio talkshow host Vicki McKenna, who said she has watched Stossel “bust consumer scams and be a soldier for consumer issues for years,” introduced Stossel.
“When John Stossel said something, I believed it,” McKenna said.
After graduating from Princeton University in 1989, Stossel said he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, and ended up working for a TV newsroom only because it was the profession that had the best travel offers.
While working in the broadcasting business, Stossel said the more he saw the country’s rule makers at work, the more he realized that “we don’t need all these rules.”
“Freedom will protect us better than the government,” Stossel told the audience members, who followed with a round of cheers.
“The government, in protecting us from bad things, protects us from good things too—and that’s worse,” he said, noting there are 50,000 new pages of rules added to the Federal Registry every year, “taking away your freedoms.”
“Patrick Henry didn’t say ‘Give me absolute safety or give me death.’ Americans need freedom,” he said.
According to Stossel, competition between businesses and “greedy people trying to make a buck” are what protect consumers from scams. “If they make a profit that’s a penny cheaper, or gets to someone a little sooner, or works a little better, they save lives, not the Bureaucrats,” he said.
Stossel said he won 19 Emmy Awards “bashing businesses night after night,” but when he began “bashing the government” the Emmy Awards stopped coming.
He said he is used to receiving criticism when walking through the streets of Manhatten. “A woman once asked me, ‘Are you John Stossel?’ and I said ‘Yes,’ to which she replied ‘I hope you die soon.’ People hate me because I’m a consumer reporter defending capitalism,” he said.
“Government monopolies always fail,” he said. “I encourage you to fight for the liberty that makes America great and makes all good things possible.”
Collegians For A Constructive Tomorrow, a national non-profit group that addresses public-interest issues, sponsored the event.
