John Stossel

Politicians claim their bills bring us good things. Free health care! Child care! A cellphone for all! But government isn’t Santa Claus. Government is force. Most every law takes away a little of our money or freedom or both. The Heritage Foundation ranks economic freedom across the globe. The United States once ranked No. 4 in the world, but we’ve been in decline. This year, as my new video…

People hate Chris Rufo. “Your agenda to turn our campus into a space of extremist indoctrination is harming our enrollment!” shouts a student at Florida’s New College. “You are the problem!” “I’m not the problem,” Rufo tells me in my newest video. “I’m actually the solution.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made Rufo a trustee of a state college. Rufo quickly moved to end what he considers leftist…

“Greed of the fossil fuel industry” is “destroying our planet,” says Sen. Bernie Sanders. Young people agree. Their solution? Socialism. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says socialism creates “an environment that provides for all people, not just the privileged few.” “Nonsense,” says Tom Palmer of the Atlas Network in my new video. Palmer, unlike Ocasio-Cortez and most of us, spent lots of time…

Social Security is toast. So is Medicare. Too many of us old people live longer, so there are not enough working people to support us. Soon both Social Security and Medicare will be broke. Our politicians don’t have the guts to do anything about it. Or even talk about it. It’s easy to see why. Recently, France’s president, trying to keep his country’s pension system from going broke, raised…

President Joe Biden and the media are excited about something new: a Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC. It’s a currency like Bitcoin, except controlled by the federal government. Not everyone is a fan. “Sometimes government does things that may appear to be benevolent but really are kind of like a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” says Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in my new video. “This is a wolf…

There’s a socialist wave in Latin America. Mexico, Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil recently elected leftists. These politicians at least distance themselves from thugs like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, but all propose socialism-lite policies giving government more control over more people. Why don’t people in Latin America learn from the mistakes of the past? Gloria Alvarez, a social media…

Some schools are ditching traditional grading. Instead, they use “labor-based grading,” an idea promoted by Arizona State University professor Asao Inoue. Labor-based grading means basing grades more on effort than the quality of work. In addition, Inoue lectured a conference of rhetoric professors “stop saying that we have to teach this dominant English. ... If you use a single standard to…

Earth Day is Saturday! Hooray? “Saving humanity from the climate crisis,” says EarthDay.org, requires us to “push away from the dirty fossil fuel economy.” Sounds logical. But my latest video explains why doing that is cruel to poor people. “Three billion people in the world still use less electricity than a typical refrigerator,” explains Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil…

When I swallow, knives cut my throat. I cough and sometimes can't stop. That's frightening. I caught COVID. Dodged it three years. But this week, I suddenly felt lousy, and a home test said: "positive." The thermometer said: 101.8. No big deal, I thought. Almost everyone gets COVID. Lots of people say it's no worse than a cold. I'm multi-vaccinated and boosted. My fever's not super high. I'm…

All big American companies now require DEI training: diversity, equity and inclusion. All big companies! Really. It sounds responsible. But it turns out DEI courses are often useless and sometimes racist. First comes groveling. My new video about DEI shows a conference that begins with a “land acknowledgement.” A Microsoft employee apologizes for taking land from “the Sammamish, the Duwamish,…

Your flight is delayed? Blame your government. OK, it’s not always government’s fault. Sometimes it’s weather or mechanical problems. But often we suffer horrible flight delays because politicians won’t relinquish power. In January, flights were grounded when the government’s “Notice to Air Missions” system broke down. That was just the latest incident. America rightly prides itself on being…

Government imposes a million rules. Americans seem to want more! Leftists want new gun laws and bans on single-use plastics, gas stoves, fossil fuels, gas-powered cars, nuclear power. Conservatives want to ban porn and books that discuss gender identity and critical race theory. People just accept bans on recreational drugs, flavored vapes and menthol cigarettes. Thomas Jefferson said, “The…

Classified documents are found in Donald Trump’s home! Democrats were outraged! Trump is guilty of “mishandling of some of our nation’s most sensitive secrets” creating “a national security crisis!” said MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Nicole Wallace. Then President Joe Biden got caught. Suddenly conservatives were upset. “Thanks to Joe Biden,” said Sean Hannity, “America’s most sensitive secrets were…

What will happen in the future? Is there a way to know? There is, maybe. One technique that predicts the future better than any other is prediction markets. The stock market is one. It lets people bet on prospects of companies. The market often predicts wrong, but a rising stock price is a better forecaster of company success than 100 executives or 10,000 politicians. Falling stocks are good…