Stossel September 2020
American Conservative University
English - September 14, 2020 10:00 - 43 minutes - 29.2 MB - ★★★★★ - 508 ratingsPolitics News Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
China's Dark Turn
“I’m more anti-China than you!” That’s one theme of this Presidential election. But not long ago, American presidents were excited about China. The Communist dictators had began to allow private property, and the economy boomed. But sadly, political repression may have gotten worse. ---- Don't miss a single video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 ---- 20 years ago, Bill Clinton said that China wouldn't be able to censor the internet. "That’s sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall," Clinton quipped, to laughter. "Well, the Chinese figured out how to nail jello to the wall," journalist Melissa Chen of The Spectator explains. "They built an almost perfectly walled-in internet. What they call the Great Firewall." The world wide web is not world wide in China. Most major Western internet sites are blocked. A few computer nerds evade the ban, but by and large, China effectively controls their internet. Even harmless jokes are banned. Because China's dictator, Xi Jinping, looks a bit like Winnie the Pooh, now "any time a Winnie the Pooh picture or somebody mentioning Winnie the Pooh ends up getting scrubbed from the internet," Chen explains. People who post forbidden things online may have their lives restricted. "You can't make doctor's appointments... you can't travel. So they'll block you from buying a train ticket or a plane ticket. You can't basically engage in modern day life in China." China's minorities have it even worse. The government wages cultural genocide against the Uighurs population. It's cracked down on Hong Kong, too, where protesters demanding freedom waved American flags. They understand the importance of freedom. I wish American protesters did! China’s repression should remind us how critical liberty is.
Big Spending Biden
Joe Biden ran as a "moderate" in the primary, but now he wants more than a trillion in new spending each year. His Vice Presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, proposed even MORE spending. ---- Don't miss a single video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 --- Here’s what Biden wants to do with your money now. In January, we added up and compared the Democratic candidates' spending plans. Joe Biden did the best! He asked for "just" $532 billion in new spending each year. But since then, he's added all sorts of new plans. He wants to massively increase climate spending, adding $500 billion every year. Biden's new plan would do things like fund 500,000 charging stations for electric cars and create a “climate conservation corps”. He also now wants $75 billion per year plan to fund caregivers. That sounds nice, but as Pete Sepp, President of the National Taxpayers Union, tells me: "Why not leave more money in people's pockets to begin with so they can afford to provide care for their families? ... We as taxpayers know better to take care of our own families and ourselves than some distant government in Washington, D.C." That's just the start of the new spending that Biden wants. The video above has more of it. Next week, I compare Donald Trump's track record and plans for spending. Which candidate would add more to the debt?
"Anti-Racist" Racists
Protests pushed Americans to want to do something about racial injustice. Good! There are policies that should be changed to make society fairer: End the drug war. Limit police unions. Cut big government programs that encourage dependency. ---- Don't miss a single video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 --- But many activists make things worse in their obsession with race, say Kmele Foster of Freethink and radio host Larry Elder. Black Lives Matter leaders even push Marxism and criticize the nuclear family. See for yourself here: https://blacklivesmatter.com/blms-wha... Elder says blacks would benefit if more grew up in nuclear families: "The number one problem facing the black community is absence of fathers and Black Lives Matter actually is encouraging that." Also -- are you NOT racist? Not good enough! Activists now say we must all be "anti-racist." Sounds nice, but Foster points out that activists pushing "anti-racism" have redefined the term "racism" to include "any policy that has an effect that is disproportionate." That means even supporting a tax deduction is racist because on average, whites deduct more than blacks. The "anti-racists" also support segregation and other racist ideas, Foster adds. A now-retracted project by the Smithsonian lists “hard work” and “the scientific method” as "white culture." You can see it here: https://web.archive.org/web/202006110... That was meant to be "woke" -- a critique of oppressive white culture -- but it's also eerily similar to what white supremacists say. "It's offensive to suggest that black people can't aspire to or can't possess all of the values that are outlined in a document like this," Foster says. Foster and Stossel prefer Martin Luther King's dream for his children: a nation that judges "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Thank You, Fossil Fuels
Today’s Black Lives Mater protests often include the claim that fossil fuel use is racist, because climate change will hurt the poor and minorities most. But minorities and poor would be hurt even more if limits are put on fossil fuels. ---- Don't miss a single video from Stossel TV, sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 --- Having electricity doesn't guarantee wealth, but not having it almost always means poverty. As energy journalist Robert Bryce says in his new movie Juice: How Electricity Explains the World: "Electricity has allowed people, in particular women and girls, to escape the drudgery of past eras. It has liberated them from the pump, the stove, and the washtub." Electricity also "allowed us to conquer our oldest foe, darkness." It let people work and study in the evening. It’s made streets safer. But most cheap electricity comes from an unpopular source: fossil fuels like oil and gas. Climate activists demand we move to "green" alternatives. But those are expensive. The Greens’ impractical dreams hurt the poor most. "It's going to have a bigger impact on low income and middle-income Americans," says Bryce. You can watch his whole documentary on iTunes here: https://apple.co/3e4quem Or watch above for my abbreviated version.
SpaceX Does What Government Won’t
On August 2nd, two American astronauts return to Earth. Their launch was the first from the US in 10 years. It wasn’t NASA that sent them into space. NASA would still be filling out forms and running up costs. It was Elon Musk‘s SpaceX that did it. Private enterprise makes good things possible. --- Don't miss a single video from Stossel TV, sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 --- “Musk had not only done something that it was ... thought that only the governments or superpowers could do—he had done things that they thought they couldn't do,” says aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Space. But wait: NASA sent astronauts to the moon. Why couldn't they do what SpaceX did? Because after that success, they became just another bureaucratic government agency. Zubrin explains, “When you don't have a truly commanding purpose, the purpose of the program becomes to supply money to various suppliers.” Like Lockheed Martin, where Zubrin worked and where he discovered a way for a rocket to carry twice as much weight. When he pitched it to management, they responded, "Look, if the Air Force wants us to improve the Titan, they'll pay us to do it," says Zubrin. NASA paid the contractor’s development costs, then added 10% percent profit. The more projects cost, the bigger the profit. So innovation was discouraged by how NASA paid most contractors. "You have good people engaged in cost maximization,” says Elon Musk. “You just gave them an incentive to do that.” High costs were okay at NASA, as long as spaceships were assembled in many congressmen’s districts. “NASA is a very large job program,” aerospace lawyer James Dunstan explains, “By spreading its centers across the country, NASA can get more support from more different congressmen.” Fortunately, now private competitors are finding better and cheaper ways to launch astronauts into space. Musk’s SpaceX invented rocket boosters that land themselves. NASA dropped theirs into oceans. “If you had to get a new plane everytime you flew somewhere … very few people could afford to fly,” explains Musk. His next spacecraft, Starship, is meant to take people to Mars and back. Let’s celebrate the entrepreneurs who break government’s old rules.
Progressive "Paradise"
Minneapolis did most everything progressives wanted -- but the city still had racist cops, and violent riots after they killed George Floyd. --- Don't miss a single video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 --- Minneapolis burned even though it adopted most every "progressive" idea: a $15 minimum wage, housing subsidies, mandatory paid leave, "green" targets, strong unions, and the most expensive school system in the state. Did they at least reduce the racial income gap? Minneapolis’ black/white income disparity is about the biggest in the country. That confuses the media. “Minneapolis had progressive policies, but its economy still left black families behind,” reads a headline in the Washington Post. Instead of “but," the word should be: “therefore.” Because as Minnesota Senate candidate Jason Lewis points out: "When you take away the incentive for work and savings and investment, you get less of it." But Minneapolis politicians say they just need even more government. And even less free enterprise! "Capitalism as we know it" must go!... says councilman Cam Gordon. In the video above, we debate.
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Activists Seize Newsrooms
Political activists have started to take over newsrooms, forcing out people who hold “offensive” opinions. Where is all the intolerance coming from? ---- Don't miss a single video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 - ---- At the New York Times, head opinion editor James Bennett resigned for committing the sin of running an op-ed by a Republican senator, which said the military should help control riots. Bennett resigned after his colleagues took to Twitter and eerily all posted this exact same wording: "Running this puts Black @NYTimes staffers in danger." "That language spoke to a potential legal concern,” says Robby Soave, author of "Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump". "Various workplace harassment protections that are well-intended,” says Soave, lead activists to say, "if you have a responsibility to have a racially hospitable climate in the workplace, then how can you allow someone to say something that offends me?'" I point out: "But [Cotton's op-ed] didn't put their lives in danger." "No it didn't," he responds. "It's absurd, and they're only claiming it because that's their way -- that's their tactic for seizing power in the workplace." Soave also says he knows where they learned this tactic, on college campuses. He covered the incident in 2016 where dozens of Yale students surrounded a professor and shouted at him, calling for him to be fired. What had he done? He defended his wife for sending out an email to students saying she had no business censoring Halloween costumes -- even ones that represented people from other cultures. "The message that you sent proclaiming that cultural appropriation on Halloween is totally permissible is, is hurtful!” shouted one student. Others broke into tears. One refused to shake the professor's hand, shouting, "I want your job to be taken from you!" It was. He had to resign as the head of a Yale residential house. His wife did, too, and she also quit teaching. Now those former students have graduated, and many are using the same tactics in the workforce, especially in the news media. Watch the video above for more on how they're changing journalism.
Doomsayers Keep Getting It Wrong
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Experts and models constantly over-predict disaster! --- Don't miss a single video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 --- "Experts" at Imperial College London told us: shut things down for COVID-19, or more than 2 million Americans will die! They also said, even if the whole population socially-distanced, more than 1 million will die by August. The “experts” model was way off. So far, almost 140,000 Americans have died. Yet that same flawed model convinced the United Kingdom to implement a costly lock down. President Donald Trump cited it, too. Too often, such rhetoric is used to shut down dissent. "There is no such thing as 'THE science'," science journalist Matt Ridley tells me. "There is science. And science consists of people disagreeing with each other." In the case of that failed COVID-19 model, we all should have been wary. The same researchers had an awful track record, having predicted 136,000 deaths from mad cow disease, 65,000 from swine flu, and 200 million from bird flu. The actual number of deaths, for each of those diseases, was in the hundreds! Models constantly over-predict disaster -- whether COVID-19, climate change, or resource depletion. The video above explains.