Well-stated.
John Stossel : Anything That's Peaceful: "This week the Left arrived in Washington, excited about the wonderful things it will do to us -- I mean, for us. They always do it for us.
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Choice is good. As a libertarian, I'm all over choice. But strangely, today, liberals are mostly about what Americans should not be allowed to choose.
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I'm a classical liberal. I believe people should have the freedom to do anything that is peaceful. That's truly liberal. I want the word back"
Thursday, January 22, 2009
John Stossel on True Liberty and Choice
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2 comments:
Hi, another comment, this time to your linked opinion article...
I have some trouble with a couple of his gross generalizations:
1. "A truly liberal FDA would acknowledge that adults own their bodies and can decide for themselves what risks are appropriate."
2. "Free trade lets everyone in the world find the best buys, no matter where they are. It gives us more things for less money."
These two pie-in-the-sky views describe only part of a vastly complex structure of information discovery, dissemination, and comprehension that pretty much only a few could understand. How many of us have the time or capacity to research, understand, and apply the full scope or magnitude of the market to even tell what the best deal is when it comes to purchasing goods, services or medical treatment, even with the government mandated controls in place (building codes, price-fixing restraints, truth-in-advertising laws, etc.). I think it's realistic to say that without somes laws and controls, "free trade" would result in large and frequent cases of business and persons doing some serious damage to individuals, and communities, before the market adjusted to punish them. And "punishment" even assumes that somehow the information gets out that the company/individual was a bad choice based on the customers' reviews! With proper business alliances, even that communication could be controlled by the businesses themselves!
As especially for the medical field, the complexity of medial information needed to make an informed decision on the best choice of chemical or device related treatments is more complex than most can imagine. And with the pay-ola (pay for play) aspects or pharmaceutical kick backs *already* present under the radar in this "over-regulated" field, choices are not always clearly and completely explained by the doctors.
Free-trade is a lot more complex than he presents, and while his articles are far from a full thesis on the subject, I would think he would offer more than platitudes and buss-phrases to support his point of view.
And as some of his commenters point out, is there any aspects of the "conservative" (another word stolen from its true meaning) over-regulation and intruding into personal freedom? Please please please find me some of his (or any other's) articles that point them out!
Robert, thanks very much for the thoughtful comments. On the conservative issues ... there's no question that letting social conservatives dictate what they want politically would be bad from the view of libertarians and others interested in individual liberty. I'm confident that Stossel would agree.
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