i was not offered a job by Fox.
I went over and begged,
"Please hire me; I can't stand it anymore."
You've become a very are popular person on
the Fox Network both in terms of
your show and
the segments you do with Bill O'Reilly.
Why did you leave ABC though?
Because it sucked there. They were hostile
to these ideas that
have made us prosperous and I
consider so important.
I mean they tolerated me for years. I got
good ratings, so that they put the stuff on.
They sort of held their nose, and
put it on, but by the end, they were saying,
"Oh, your're predictable Stossel. All you want
to do islibertarian economics all the time.
I don't want to watch that.
You already did that." I did a piece called
"Stupid in America",
which got good ratings about school
choice. Five years later there was a real
school choice movement. I said,
"Let's do a follow-up!"
"Eh, we're not...
Michael Jackson died, and 
we want to interview
his sister and his mother.
We have to do a show on how he's still
dead."
I was not offered a job by Fox.
I went over and begged,
"Please hire me. I can't stand
it anymore."
The left is often good at proposing
solutions to problems even if
those solutions won't actually do much
to solve the problem, or eve if the problems
doesn't exist. So how do they have that
success? How do they always
piggy back on government
solving the problem at the end of the
day?
Well that's what this
No They Can't is about. That they
promise this stuff.
[Enthusiastically] 
Elect Obama! Yes we can! We can
cure poverty, and stop the oceans
from rising, as he said one
speech.
And our instinct, I think, is to believe
in the central planners. It was nuts at
the Obama election. It was like he was a
magic politician who was going to do these
things.
And the
promise
is all people pay attention to. 
People have lives.
And the failures,
which are again and again
everything,
you relly have to pay attention to notice.
So how do conservatives, who often have a
more free-market and less regulatory
approach,
adopt...get their message out in
ways that counter this prevailing
government knows best attitude?
I like graphs. I have some in the book
that help, I think,
tell the story. Under Clinton, the
OSHA director had a graph. 
"[Sarcastically]Look how workplace
deaths have dropped since OSHA was created."
What makes it interesting, and yea,
but what makes it interesting is that
the
second graph shows
before and after OSHA.
And the slope of the line
is the same.
Free people make things
better on our own without
government, but we have to
tell people that.
You've done a great job in your
profession telling stories, and being
able to communicate complex economic
issues in ways that
the American People can understand. How
important of a factor is that in
communicating some of the ideas 
that you have?
It's very important, and
I don't think i'm that
good at it.
Arthur Brooks at AEI talks about how
moral arguments for capitalism are much
more effective effective than numbers and
the graphs, but I'm not good at that.I
gravitate to the numbers, or the graphs,
or the gimmicks like when Paul Krugman
said
9/11 would cause
an economic boom because of the rebuilding.
and Nancy Pelosi said that about the
earthquake in Haiti.
It's the Bastiat Principal of the
seen versus the unseen.
So how do I illustrate that?
Well I
buy from a junkyard some old TVs and cars
and go there with a sledgehammer and smash
things, and say,
"Oh, Stimulus!
I'm going to create wealth and smash
things because they'll have to replace these."
And then you can see the Bastiat
Principal of you've got to take that
money,
money that's now going in to replace this
stuff
might have been used for something else,
but that's the unseen that
the reporters don't get.
I want to ask you, the president was on the
stump yesterday talking about the
"Buffet Rule" and income inequality yet again.
It's clearly not going to do anything to
the
deficit, but the White House keeps
bringing it up and it's probably going
to continue to do this. So is it resonating?
I would think so. It's more complicated
to say that it's only going to raise
two billion
out of the one and a half trillion
dollar deficit,
and it might kill the golden geese, and
some of the rich people are gonna
produce less wealth, innovate less,
create fewer jobs.
Some of them are going to hire lawyer
tricksters to dodge the taxes anyway.
But it took me a long time to say that.
It takes Obama a second to say,
"minimum tax for millionaires." So I live
in the shell of media world, and on a subject
like that
shallow wins.
