Mr. John Stossel                                                                                              Correspondent and Co-Host, 20/20                                                                            ABC News

John Stossel - Employment- Correspondent and Co-anchor of ABCNEWS' 20/20 (1994-present); former consumer editor, Good Morning America. Works- Author, Give Me a Break and Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Why Everything You Know Is Wrong. Special Mention- Awarded, 19 Emmy Awards; awarded, George Foster Peabody Award; honored five times for excellence in consumer reporting, National Press Club. Education- B.A., Psychology, Princeton University. Personal- Lives in New York, NY.

"Freedom and Its Enemies"

MR. STOSSEL:  So you guys are mostly friends.  You believe passionately in what you believe, but are you winning hearts and minds?

I wonder about that.  You have an uphill battle, and I would like to talk about that today and what I have learned about it in my 36 years of reporting, because I was your enemy for a long time.  I got into media because I was a garden‑variety liberal coming out of Princeton and falling into a television job, and I approached life like most young reporters do.  I became a consumer reporter, and my attitude was that capitalism is largely evil.

I mean, it's okay.  It brings us some stuff, but, by and large, it is cruel and unfair and destructive to the earth, and so we need government and lawyers suing to protect us from you capitalists, and that is the kind of reporting I did for 10, 15 years, and there were lots of companies to make fun of.  The Coffee Institute was running ads saying "Coffee is the drink that picks you up, while it calms you down."

So we'd call them up, and we'd say, "How can you say this?  It is contradictory."

"Well, we have research to back this up."

"Really?  What's the research?"

"Well, we surveyed thousands of people.  We asked them what do you get out of your coffee break.  Some people said it picked them up.  Some people said it calmed them down."

MR. STOSSEL:  So this is why we consumer activists said you got to regulate these people.  They are always trying to cheat us, and intuitively, this makes sense.  Intuitively, it makes sense that life is too complicated.  We can't make these judgments for ourselves.  We need the wise elites in Washington and State capitals to make the decisions for us, to set the rules, and I believed that for too many years. But as a TV consumer reporter, I had an unusual ringside seat on the regulatory state, and I got to watch them work.

It took me too long to see it, but it soon became clear that they weren't making life better.  First of all, there was the vast amount of money they were taking.  The least of it was the taxes that they took.  The big cost was the indirect cost, all the creative energy and the money that is lost trying to game the system.

You have the smartest kids in colleges now not going into science or medicine.  They are going to law school.  Half of you are lawyers.  This doesn't make America wealthier.

All this creative energy that is lost, filling out the forms, forming the trade associations, trying to lobby government, so it won't extinguish your creativity is a huge waste.  It just strangles economic growth.

I would also argue it strangles something in the human spirit.  If you were in Moscow before the fall of Communism, you saw that dead‑eyed look people have.  What's that about? Was it all about fear of the KGB?  I don't think so.  I don't think they were in people's life on an everyday basis. That is just the look you get when you live in an all‑regulated state.  If you go to the Agriculture Department offices, you see the same look.

By contrast, the more I saw the free market work, suddenly I woke up.  Wow, market competition protects us, too.  In fact, it protects us better than all these rules.  It is not perfect.  Perfect isn't one of the options.  You are going to have some Enrons and WorldComms, but as a local reporter, I could find a million scams to do, but once I got to "Good Morning America" and "20/20," it was tougher to find truly national scams because the Enrons are the exception.  In a $13‑trillion economy, you are going to have a few, but even there, it wasn't government that discovered Enron.  It was the market.  It was the stock analysts who couldn't get honest answers to their questions, and finally, the stock started to tank, and then the scam came out.  And nobody is laughing all the way to the bank.  They didn't get away with it.  They are being punished.

Compare that to when government messes up, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs can't find $3 billion of the Indians' money.  Nobody is fired.  Nobody is even reprimanded.  They just go back to Congress and say, "We need another 3 bill," and we give it to them.

By contrast, the more I saw market competition work, the more I saw it protects us even in areas where intuitively we wouldn't think it would.  As an example, look at the greedy profit‑driven companies that have employed me.

I have worked for ABC, NBC, CBS.  They get all their profits, every penny, from advertisers.  So, intuitively, you would think they would let advertisers run the show, control everything, but they don't.  Every network has a board of censors that reviews every ad that comes in, demands two studies before you can make a medical claim.  It drives the advertising agencies crazy with wording changes, sometimes turns them down outright.  Why would they do that? Because the market works in unexpected ways.  They figured out that they would make more money if they policed themselves, and their ad time was not thought of as an environment for sleaze.  So they restrict the advertisers on their own.

Or how about the fact that I was allowed to do consumer reporting for 30 years?  When consumer reporting began, Ralph Nader said, "You will never see it on commercial TV stations because they won't want to offend their sponsors." But what is the truth today? The opposite is true, as is the case of so much of what Ralph says.

There is on consumer reporting on PBS because the timid bureaucrats in charge are too nervous about offending anybody, but most commercial TV stations have consumer reporters criticizing sponsors.

I mean, I made fun of Bufferin and Excedrin for lying in their ads saying they were the best when aspirin is aspirin. It is all the same.

Bristol‑Myers, which makes them both, sued me and CBS for $25 million.  You would have thought CBS would have said Stossel ain't worth that, but they didn't.  They said go ahead, keep doing it.  So why was Nader so wrong?  Again, because the market instinctively works to protect consumers. In this case, yes, CBS lost some money and legal fees, and the larger loss was when advertisers would get mad and pull out a big account. But more people would watch a news program that told the truth about sponsors' products, too, and with a larger audience, the commercial networks made more money.  So they employed consumer reporters.

The market protects us in ways we don't even think about.  We just take it for granted.  We take it for granted that I can go to a foreign country and take a piece of plastic and stick it in a wall and cash will come out.  I can take that same piece of plastic and give it to a total stranger, the guy doesn't even speak my language, and he will rent me a car for a week, and when I get home, Visa or MasterCard will have the accounting to the penny, but the government can't even count the votes correctly in Florida and Ohio.

And yet, our instinct is to turn to government.

After September 11th, we turned to government to run airport security.  Tom Daschle said, "You can't professionalize if you don't federalize," and the Senate voted 100 to zero for it.  It is our instinct to turn to government.  We don't trust markets.

Now, when I say this to less sophisticated groups, they say, well, maybe free market competition will protect us from trivial things like that, but when it comes to the serious stuff, whether we live or die, whether we are safe, then you got to have government.  Life is too complicated.  You need the CPSC to protect us from dangerous products and the FDA and the DEA and the whole alphabet soup of agencies that keep growing, and again, intuitively, it makes sense.  It is a complicated world.  Let's have the experts make judgments, but now I have to say, do they really make life safer or better?  No.  Because all these well‑intended rules always cause nasty, unexpected side effects, and they're worse.

Campaign finance reform is a recent example.  Global warming will be the next one.  But let me look at it, just to be provocative, in an area where I assume most of you will disagree with me.  Let's take the extreme idea as a thought experiment.  Let's look at the drug laws.  Let's take legal and illegal.

Illegal first.  Now, I have a teenage son.  Intuitively, I am glad that heroin and cocaine are illegal. He can't zip down to the neighborhood pharmacy and go get high.  Maybe that will deter him, and it will send the message that it is immoral to engage in these kind of behaviors. But I am not sure it really works because, as all of you know who have kids, we are not keeping the stuff away from them.  They say it is as easy to get as alcohol.  We can't even keep it out of prison.  So I don't know how we think we are keeping it out of America.  So I am not sure what this well‑intended law accomplishes, but I now can see the unintended side effects, and they are really nasty.  They are nastier than the drugs.

I will just mention a few.  There is the drug crime.  I mean, the worst of the drugs is meth and cocaine, and that accounts for maybe 1 percent of the drug crime that people get high and do nasty things.  Ninety‑nine percent of the drug crime is because it is illegal.  Our government says nicotine and heroin are equally addictive, but nobody is knocking over 7‑Elevens to get Marlboros.  It is the law that causes the crime.  The sellers can't rely on the police to protect their private property.  So they arm themselves and form gangs, and the buyers steal to pay the high prices.

Secondly, we are corrupting cops.  We are asking cops to turn down $10,000 bribes.  Not all do.  We are creating huge, unbelievably rich criminal gangs.  We forget that Al Capone and the Mafia were created by alcohol prohibition.  The gangs we are creating now with drug prohibition are even richer.  They'll soon be able to buy nuclear weapons.  Osama bin Laden was funded partly with drug money.  We are telling peasants in Colombia to hate us, to view conservative Americans or Republicans as evil authoritarians.  How does that make us safer?

So what is the purpose of this?  Well, to protect us from ourselves, but if that is a role for government in a free society, then we invite government to invade all portions of our lives.  We might as well have exercise police come into our homes and make us run laps and do pushups.

Are you cheering that on, or are you just relieved the Clinton administration didn't propose that?

I am not saying drugs aren't harmful.  I am just saying cruelty is harmful, too, but we don't try to make it illegal.

Let's go on to legal drugs.  The FDA protects us from snake oil sellers, and here, too, I am glad.  I am glad that these people are making sure the drugs are safe and effective.  That is the FDA's mandate.  I am not capable of judging that, and their first big success was thalidomide.  Many of you are old enough to remember it.  It was this drug women took during pregnancy.  It was a tranquilizer.  It stopped morning sickness, very effective, but some women gave birth to children with no arms and no legs.  It wasn't that the FDA was so smart that they protected us.  They were just so slow that by the time it was toward the end of the approval process, the bad effects were being seen elsewhere, but I am glad they protected us from those thalidomide babies.

But again, I now have to ask, is it worth it?  I don't think so because when we empower government to protect us from bad things, we empower it to protect us from good things, too, and that is worse, because it is the innovation that really makes our lives better.

Since the thalidomide success, the FDA has grown in size tenfold, and now to get a new drug approved, it takes 12 to 15 years.  So some years ago, the FDA proudly announced at a press conference, it was approving a new heart drug.  This new beta-blocker will save 14,000 American lives a year.  Nobody stood up to say, "Hey, that's great, but didn't that also mean you killed 14,000 people last year and the year before?"  No reporter asked that because reporters don't think that way, but it did mean that.

The problem is the bias of the media.  We partly make it worse here because I can take a picture of the problem.  I can put the thalidomide baby on the cover of the news magazines, as we did, but I don't know which of you would be saved by the new heart drug.  I don't know whose picture to take, and of course, the bureaucrat is in big trouble if he says yes to something that hurts someone, but if he approves it and it saves a thousands lives, nobody knows.

Right now in this 15‑year pipeline, there are fat substitutes, something they would let you eat three of these chocolate cakes and not get fat.

Yeah, right.  That's my attitude.

But we're waiting to make sure there is no carcinogen in there, and my first reaction is to say, "Look, let's make sure it's safe."  But think about it.  Thousands of Americans die every year now because we are overweight.  Don't they count in the equation?  No, not much.  The favor is on protecting against the new thing.

Now, what am I saying?  Not having FDA?  This sounds terrifying, and it is not going to happen.  It is a thought experiment, but let me raise some alternatives.  Why in this free society do we wimply, meekly sit back and let our government say to us, "You are forbidden to put that in your own body.  Don't we own our own bodies?"  Why couldn't the FDA's review be voluntary?  Those of us who are cautious would only take those FDA‑approved drugs, but if you were dying, if you had a terminal illness, you could try something without having to break your country's laws and go to some dubious clinic in Mexico or import something illegally from Europe, and we would learn from that experimentation, and what we learn would save other lives later.

          I'd argue further that America should have learned from the fall of the Soviet Union that government agencies don't do anything well, and if you simply eliminated the FDA's monopoly, then private groups, maybe underwriters, laboratories, or consumer reports would spring up and do the job better.

In any case, isn't leaving the choice up to us what America is supposed to be about?  Patrick Henry didn't say give me absolute safety or give me death.

Now, as a consumer reporter, we deal with the other element of protection for Americans beyond government, and that is the trial lawyers.

All right.  We have the appropriate hissing in the room, but as a free marketer, I should like what the trial lawyers do, now that I have discovered the power of markets, because they are an alternative to clumsy, one‑size‑fits‑all, big government regulation.  They are the private lawsuit.  If there is a wrong, they attack just the wrong.  They are kind of like a supplement to Adam Smith's invisible hand.  They are the invisible fist.

So, in theory, this should be good in practice because there is no loser pays rule.  They have gamed the system.  So, for every person they help, they hurt 100 people, hugely destructive, and yet, whenever there is talk of reform ‑‑ and your speaker tomorrow night is a former trial lawyer, and I am told has resisted reform under the name of federalism, so maybe that is the reason.  I hope so, anyway, but the lawyers always say, "Who but we will deter bad behavior, deter those evil doctors, bad doctors, and deter companies that would make things that would hurt people, and who but we will compensate their victims?"  And when they say that, the opposite tends to fold, but both their claims are deceitful.

Who but we will deter the bad behavior?  Well, excuse me.  We have lots of prosecutors in America, State Attorneys, Attorneys General, District Attorneys.  They can punish people who commit fraud.  We have plenty of laws for that, and above all, we have the markets.  The market punishes bad actors better than anybody because word gets out.  The bad companies atrophy.

And when they talk about compensation, who but we will compensate the victims?  Well, there are other ways to compensate victors.  There is workers' comp, Social Security disability payments, Medicaid, best of all private charity. None of it is perfect, but all of it is better than the trial lawyers.

I mean, what kind of compensation system is it where it takes 5 to 10 years for people to get their money?  And then most of the people who get the money may not be deserving.  A Harvard study of medical malpractice found that fewer than 5 percent of the people who were victims of malpractice ever collected anything, and most of the people who did collect were not victims of malpractice.  It is a horribly blunt instrument.

And most disgusting, what kind of compensation system is it where most of the money goes to the middle men, goes to the lawyers?  You may say what does he mean most of it, the plaintiff's attorneys only take 30, 40 percent, but if you add in that 30 or 40 percent to the defense lawyer cost and the court cost, up to 70 percent of the money goes to the process.  This is a repulsive way to compensate people.

And I am just talking about the cost.  You have heard about the tort tax.  Cars cost about $500 more to pay for this.  A pacemaker, a heart pacemaker, several thousand dollars more, but I still argue that is the least of it.  The bigger cost to our health and freedom is all the good stuff we don't get to have because people are scared.

Years ago, there were 20 companies in America researching and making vaccines.  We want lots of them to do that.  Who knows what bioweapon is coming next or anthrax, SARS, bird flu.  Let's have lots of vaccine makes, but then the trial lawyers sued the DPT vaccine makers saying it could have been safer.  I assume it was junk science, but let's say they saved a dozen lives a year.  Is it worth it?  No.  Because when they sued 20 companies, as I said were making these vaccines, now there are five.  Many got out of the business because they said, "We don't make that much money from our vaccine business.  Let's stick to our pimple cream business or our shampoo business.  Why take the risk?"  So how are we safer with five vaccine makers instead of 20?

Presidential Candidate Edwards, he made $40 to $80 million ‑‑ he won't say how much ‑‑ from these kinds of suits, and most were personal injury suits.  Most of those were medical malpractice suits.  Most of those were cerebral palsy cases.  He said, "If the doctor had only done a c‑section, he should have known to do it.  The baby wouldn't have been deprived of oxygen, and the baby wouldn't have cerebral palsy now," which is so expensive for the parents to take care of it.

And he was a good lawyer.  He won big verdicts.  He sometimes would channel the baby.  He would say, "I hear her calling let me out, let me out, and the doctor wouldn't do a c‑section."  In that case, a jury awarded $4 million.

All right.  It was a theory.  It was possible, and since those suits from him and others, the rate of c‑sections in America has gone from 6 percent of all births to 29 percent of all births.  Now, some of it is because the operation has improved, and some women even schedule it for convenience, but much of it is because doctors are just covering their rears, frightened of the John Edwards of the world.

          Now, the c‑section is a much nastier operation, four times as likely to kill the woman, more pain, longer hospital stay, bigger scar.  Did it at least reduce the incidence of cerebral palsy?  No, not a bit.  It turns out, well, whoops, he was wrong.  Is he giving the money back?  No.

Does the press even ask him about it?  No.

The lawyers even interfere with the information flow that helps the free people protect themselves.  For example, when you fire someone, those of you who are employers, fire Fred because he is reckless or lazy, do you ever say if somebody asks, "Oh, yeah.  I fired Fred because he was reckless and lazy"?  No.  Your human resources department says, "Just say you agreed to part company," because you are afraid of a labor lawsuit because even when you win, you lose.

Delta, when they fire a drunken pilot, doesn't tell America, which doesn't make it safer.

They even interfere with the labels we ought to read to make ourselves safer.  You ought to read the microwave popcorn labels, "Don't open it like this."  It will burn you if you do, but who reads labels?

You ought to read drug labels, the tetracycline, the antibiotic.  Don't take it with milk, it says, but do you ever read drug inserts?  They are too long.

Have you ever looked at a birth control pill insert?  I happen to have one here.

How does this make us safer?  It is tiny print.  Even the doctor doesn't read it, and if you read it, you wouldn't want the pill anymore.

My point is that I was just learning that free market competition will protect us better than government or lawyers.

Now, I am not an anarchist.  I am not saying we need no government.  The worst places to live are the places that don't have enough government, where you have no rule of law. That was the genius of the founders, limited government, rule of law.  You don't want to live in an African country where everyone is afraid to build a factory because your neighbor might steal what you make, or the dictator might take the whole factory.  Those are the worst places to live. So we need rule of law.  We need some environmental rules.  We need government to keep us safe, but how much government do we need?

Let me back up a bit.  First, people say, "Well, maybe the free market would protect us because we are educated," but what about the poor and the ignorant?  You have got to have government to protect them, but here, too, the market works in unexpected ways.

Take as an example cars.  Do you understand what makes one safer over another or run more smoothly?  I don't, but it is hard to get really ripped off buying a car in America.  Compare the worst you can buy here with the best the planned economies could produce.  Remember that?  The Trabant, pride of the Eastern Bloc.

Yet, it disappeared as soon as the wall fell.  So why?  Why was their best unable to compete with our worst?  Because not everybody has to be an expert for the market to work.  You just need a few car buffs, a few people to read the car magazines, and through word of mouth, the good news spreads, and the bad news, too.  The good companies thrive.  The market will protect us in most cases, but then, as I was saying, we need some government.  But how much government do we need?  What percentage of the economy or of national income should it be?

Grover Norquist talks about this, but politicians rarely do. I wish they would because when you ask people this, they say, "Well, maybe government should be 5 percent, 10 percent of the economy," but here is a graph of the growth of government over the history of the republic.  For most of the history of America, it was less than 5 percent of national income.  It is only recently that it started approaching the 40 percent that it is now, and, of course, the slope of the line just shows how the promise is being made now.  Medicare or Social Security, there is just no way they can keep them, and yet, they keep promising to do more.

They promise rich people that they will insure you if you build on the edge of an ocean.  I did that.  I bought a house on the edge of an ocean.  I built one, actually, and my father said, "Are you nuts?  It is on the edge of an ocean," but it had lots of sand in front of it, and I said, "My architect says I can't lose because there is a program called Federal Flood Insurance where for $200 a year they will cover my house," and it was true because ‑‑ next slide please ‑‑ not long after that, the bottom floor went when the water came up, and you rebuilt the bottom floor.  Thank you.

I never invited you there.  It was a great view, but you paid anyway.  I am grateful.  Eventually, the whole house went, and Federal Flood Insurance totally covered me.  Government can't stop.

So this is how I start now talking about this in my reporting, and this has changed my career in journalism in New York in that I used to win Emmy Awards.  I haven't won a single one since I started criticizing government rather than business.

Somebody came up to me in Manhattan and said, "Are you John Stossel?"

"Yes."

"I hope you die soon."

And I'm trying to get a handle on what this is about, and I assume it is because they considered me a conservative, and where I live, that is akin to being a child molester.

But look, I am a libertarian.  I am not a conservative.  The last myth in my myth book discusses that.  I am grateful you have me here because you don't have any conservatives in the mainstream media.  That I am the closest thing you get to that, it really shows how biased it is.

So I am trying to figure out why do they hate me so much.  I agree with them about some things, and I think drugs should be legal, for example, and I realize that they hate me because I am a consumer reporter defending capitalism, and the elites in the media hate capitalism.  Why?

First, I thought it's the envy of the super wealthy, the disparity of wealth, but then I thought about the kings and queens of England.  They were absurdly rich, and yet they were revered by people.  Yet, people hated the bourgeoisie. They gave them that nasty name.  They hated the people who sold them the very things they needed to make their lives better.  Why is that?

I think it's because people don't understand economics.  It is not intuitive.  They don't understand business, and they think if somebody makes a profit off you, you've lost.

And I see why politicians and lawyers think that way because in their world, it is a zero‑sum game.  Somebody wins; somebody else has to lose.  But business doesn't work that way.

Bill Gates having $50 billion doesn't mean we have $50 billion less.  It is not like there is a pie and he took a big slice, so we have less.  Entrepreneurs like he baked thousands of new pies.  They made us all richer because business is voluntary.  It doesn't happen unless everybody engaged in the transaction thinks they are winning.

Only two ways to do things in life, voluntary and forced.  Government is forced.  Business is voluntary.  So every transaction, you have two winners.  You buy a cup of coffee. You have the weird double thank you moment.  You give her the buck, she gives you the coffee, thank you, thank you.

What is that about?  It is because you wanted the buck more than you wanted the coffee.  She wanted the coffee more than she wanted the buck.  You both win.  Business makes us all richer.

I have a program, a non‑profit, where I try to get some of these stories that ABC spent half‑a‑million dollars on into high school classrooms, and I talk to the high school kids, and I say, "What made America prosperous?  How come we are doing so well when others are not?"  They say, "Well, we have lots of natural resources.  We are a new country," and I say, "Well, India has natural resources."

"Oh.  Well, India is over populated."  Well, the population density of India is exactly the same as that of New Jersey. New Jersey is doing okay.

And Hong Kong has 20 times as many people per square foot, and Hong Kong got rich.  Hong Kong went from third‑world poverty to first world in less than 50 years.  Why?  Because of economic freedom, because the British rulers enforced rule of law, they kept the peace, and otherwise, they sat around and drank tea.

They left people alone, and a free people left on their own made themselves prosperous.

Liberty is what lifts more people out of the misery and mud of poverty than any system ever.  Yet, it is vilified in newsrooms and in the best academic institutions.  I thank you for fighting for that liberty that made America possible.

Thank you very much.  I am told we have time for questions or vicious criticism, comments, whatever you like. Yes, sir.

ATTENDEE:  How about vouchers in public education?

MR. STOSSEL:  How about vouchers in public education?

Well, I'm for that, obviously.  Dick Bott has given you a copy of a program I did called "Stupid in America" on why not have a market in K‑through‑12 education.  I was really worried about it on ABC, it wouldn't attract an audience, but I was surprised.  We get minute‑by‑minute ratings now, and this one went straight up.

Before this show, we talked to the people who run the international tests, and it is interesting that American kids do pretty well in fourth grade, and when the teachers say, "It is not our fault.  It is that the kids come in with parents who don't make them want to learn." But if that were the case, they would do poorly all the way through.  But in fact, they do well in fourth grade, worse by eighth grade, way behind by twelfth grade.  The longer they are in the government monopoly, the worse they do, and the biggest predictor of when a kid will do well, say the people who run the tests, is if the money is attached to the kid, and they can go to any school, private, public, but the schools have to compete.

And we interviewed a principal in Belgium where the kids had really cleaned the American kids' clocks on the international tests, and she said, "Yeah.  We have to try harder here.  We can't afford to have 10 deadwood teachers who don't get the job done because the clients will take the customers elsewhere.  We have to work harder."  What a concept.

And yet, vouchers gets voted down wherever it has been proposed.  I prefer saying attach the money to the kids, which seems more appealing, but basically, it is the same thing.

It was also nice in that I confronted the teachers and said the only thing worse than a government monopoly is a highly unionized government monopoly.

In the myth book, there is a chart of what it takes to fire a teacher in New York City.  It takes four pages of the book.

ATTENDEE:  I appreciate what you are saying about free enterprise.  I would like to ask for your comments regarding what I am seeing -- a growing involvement of Federal, State, Tribal, and local government in enterprises, in business environments themselves.  Perhaps it is time for an organization, Citizens United for the Separation of Commerce and State?

MR. STOSSEL:  Yes.  It is long overdue, and Thomas Jefferson said it is the natural progress of things for government to gain and liberty to yield, and that is the direction in which it is moving. But thank God for the animal spirits of capitalism, that its market has grown as fast as government has.

ATTENDEE:  Well, at the risk of rushing in where angels ‑‑ what is the term?  Angels fear to tread? Perhaps you would like to persuade this audience to your view on legalized prostitution.

MR. STOSSEL:  The background for this is that last week my book came out in paperback.  I have an hour show about Myths, but suddenly, I am told Brian Ross has this story on the Washington madame and how she is going to name the head of a conservative think‑tank who was a client and which turned out not to be true, and I was mad that this was taking up some of the space in my show. And then I started reading about it and how people were upset that the women were being prosecuted, but the johns were not, and I wrote a column saying, "Why is anybody being prosecuted?  Why can't consenting adults do what they want to do with their bodies? If a boxer or a football player can make money from his body, why can't a woman?"  That is the libertarian position, and of course, Bill O'Reilly calls up and says, "Why don't you come on my show and discuss that?"

It is kind of like being on with a lawn mower.

Look, I am not defending prostitution.  I have never been to a prostitute.  I hope no one I love ever goes.  I think it is a tawdry business, but as with the drug laws, I think the laws against it do more harm than good.  Nevada is a pretty nice place live.  It is legal there.  They sequester it, but they don't distract authorities by trying to stop it from happening, which never succeeds anyway.

ATTENDEE:  I was wondering if you could offer any thoughts in terms of why the mainstream media has been as consistent as it has been in this area?  I certainly understand in general, but the way in which this monopoly has been maintained, it seems in some ways rather surprising.  I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

MR. STOSSEL:  I don't have any great answer.  I have a couple theories, and part of it is obviously you hire people you are comfortable with, and I got hired because I started as somebody they were comfortable with, and then I was already successful when I started getting my specials.

Here is a cockamamie theory.  How about this?  When you are in high school, there are two kinds of people, the left‑brain and the right‑brain thinkers, and the left‑brain thinkers are the critical thinkers, the people who analyze, like you, and the right‑brain thinkers are the motors, the ones who feel your pain, like Bill.  And they were the ones who got the girls in high school.  They talked better.  They were slicker.

And they go into law and journalism, and the critical thinkers go into business and science.  The people who want to mind their own business go into business and science.  The people who want to run other people's lives go into mainstream journalism.  Thank God, we at least now have some alternatives.

ATTENDEE:  As a broadcaster, have you given any thought to the idea of the so‑called "Fairness Doctrine" with the idea that the government would regulate what is fair?

MR. STOSSEL:  Yeah, that's pretty scary, and I understand you have had some discussion about that here.  Obviously, Rush Limbaugh and Shawn Hannity were created by the getting rid of it.  I have nothing original to say on that.

ATTENDEE:  The response to that indicates we are all basically libertarians at heart.

MR. STOSSEL:  Really?

ATTENDEE:  I would like your observation on the fact that when we conservatives, libertarians, get in power, we tend to start relying on the government to do the conservative agenda, just like the liberals when they are in power, they tend to grow the size of government and look to the government to do their agenda.  Do you have any observations on that?  I know it is a pretty bad tendency on both sides.

MR. STOSSEL:  Well, it certainly is the case with our current President.  He expanded the State faster than President Clinton did.  Even if you exclude the expenditures on Iraq, he grew it faster, but I am hopeful that maybe a lesson was learned from this, and things will change. Yeah, right.  Knock on wood.

ATTENDEE:  I don't know if this was your first special, but I think it was one of your first specials, "Are we scaring ourselves to death, or are we scaring our kids to death?" around 1995.

MR. STOSSEL:  It was "Are we scaring ourselves to death?"  I wanted to call it, "We are scaring you to death," but they wouldn't let me.

ATTENDEE:  Are we still, John?

MR. STOSSEL:  Yes, we are ‑‑ the news media, the free market here, works against us.  It is kind of like free speech.  We need free speech, but that also gives us hate speech and obscenity.  We need the free press, but we pander, and more of you will watch if I say, "Tonight on '20/20,' this is going to kill you," than if I say things are okay. And it is the nature of news to talk about what is negative.

I mean, America is the most wonderful country ever.  We are living longer than ever.  All you hear from us in the media is about the risks, and it is true.  We have been exposed to things humans had never been exposed to before, invisible chemicals, radiation, all those long food additives in the processed foods.  Yet, what is the result?  We forget that at the turn of the last century, most people my age had already been dead for 10 years.  Life spans have increased 30 years while the media talked about, "Oh, the terrible things that are happening," but that is the nature of news.

I won't do it, but all my colleagues will.

ATTENDEE:  I loved your myth show, and I was just wondering if you brought your long‑haired blond wig to wear.

MR. STOSSEL:  Did I bring my long‑haired blond wig to wear? This was for a story on the unintended consequences of regulation, bike helmet laws.  Clearly, I ride a bike to work.  I am Al Gore's perfect person.  I live in an apartment.  I ride my bike to work, and I don't wear a helmet because I don't want to, but everybody told me I should.  Then a study came out and found that cars passed more closely to you when you wear a helmet because they think you are safe, another unintended side effect.  And lastly, he found that when he wore a woman's wig, they stayed even farther from him. So that is what I shot.  That is what she is referring to.

Thank you very much.  Let me close on that.