20-20's John Fossil (sic)

Last week, ABC announced that John Stossel is leaving 20-20 for a position at Rupert Murdock's Weasel News. Perhaps that's where he and all weasels belong.

Some week's ago, I sent the following message to his e-mail address. It was deleted unread. Apparently John reads messages from only people he knows. The message's text follows:

John Stossel, ABC's preeminent 20-20 video journalist, is as shallow as the water in a rill that has not been rained on in a fortnight. Last week he filled an hour with pure right-wing propaganda based on a selection of governmental actions that have not, to say the least, been beneficent in order to justify an unstated but implied conclusion that governmental attempts to ameliorate malevolent conditions should be curtailed if not entirely prohibited so that people could be left alone to solve their own problems. Ah, if only they could!

Although his examples of governmental ineptitude ring true enough to gain the assent of many people, the conclusion John draws is a gigantic non sequitur.

Indeed, bad governments do bad things. So do bad surgeons. But the fact that bad surgeons injure, maim, and often kill patients, doesn't mean that surgeons should be limited to performing only minor procedures or that surgery should be eliminated. Eliminating bad surgeons is the best way of curtailing the injuries and deaths bad surgeons inflict. The same conclusion holds for bad government. No government is not a solution to bad government; good government is. Would John deny that bad journalism doesn't have bad consequences? Wasn't bad, yellow journalism the cause of the Spanish-American War, perhaps even the current wars in the Middle East? Should journalists then be limited to merely reporting events objectively? If so, John's out of a job.

But John and most mainstream economists have an unreal view of economies. What would one say of meteorologists who claimed that the laws of meteorology apply to all weather conditions except tornadoes and hurricanes? What kind of meteorology would that be? Yet John and most mainstream economists totally ignore a vast amount of economic activity about which they have no qualms about governmental attempts to regulate, curtail, and even eliminate. Burglary, robbery, purse-snatching, fraud, the manufacture and sale of so called illegal substances, loan sharking (except when done by banks), prostitution, bribery—all are economic activities. But somehow or other, the invisible hand which is supposed to keep the economy honest without governmental regulation doesn't apply to this hidden, underground economy. How come? Isn't that just like saying that the laws of meteorology don't apply to tornadoes?

Although the evil, greedy, lying, and corrupt may populate government, such people exist in all human endeavors. There is no reason to believe that the proportion is greater in government than in business or (do tell) journalism or the Cosa Nostra. If someone truly believes in liberal and neoliberal free-market economics, shouldn't all of these be unregulated? Shouldn't all be left to the invisible hand?

But the truth is that the invisible hand is the hand of a pickpocket, and it should be treated exactly like we treat ordinary pickpockets. Of course, bad government is unlikely to do that, but no government won't do it either.

And finally, John, a propagandist is not an honest man. Although everyone (perhaps) is entitled to his own opinion, no one has a right to present it as fact. Not even you.

©2009 John Kozy