20111027-Stossel-[Stupid Consumers]-Fox Business.CF

---------- STOSSEL - [Stupid Consumers] - Fox Business Network 2011, October 27, Thursday Xvid/MP3 AVI - encoded from medium quality ReplayTV stream ---------- Were it not for the protective coercion of government in the "public" interest, checking the inherent evil of doing business, consumers would be exploited mercilessly. Thank goodness for beneficent government! John Stossel attempts to convince viewers that this commonplace notion is all wrong. [excerpted from John Stossel's blog:] I built my career doing consumer reporting, exposing bad businesses for pulling scams on people. I called for more government regulation. This kind of thing won me 19 Emmy awards. Now I realize that I had it wrong. The free market deters and punishes scams better than regulation does. Also, government rips-off more people than business ever does. Another point: some consumers are just stupid. To illustrate this, tonight we turn to Candid Camera. We'll show video of a blind taste test, in which consumers are asked to analyze the differences between several glasses of wine. They find "differences" even though every glass is the same. In another experiment, people vividly describe the "smell" from a perfume that is actually just water. These Candid Camera bits are funny, but they prove a serious point. Consumers fall for everything, including bogus "eco fads" like cage free eggs, organic produce, and much more. Why consumers are stupid, but DON'T need protection from government. That's my show, tonight.

udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80
udp://open.demonii.com:1337
udp://tracker.coppersurfer.tk:6969
udp://exodus.desync.com:6969

 skJGZV6z (2011-10-29)

My reaction: While done relatively well, there were so many opportunities to argue the free & unfettered market case better. Stossel unfortunately has a couple of misconceptions about true free market capitalism of his own (possibly owing to his Friedmanite favoritism over Hayek, Mises, and Rothbard).
There are answers to the problems of externalities like pollution-control within economic theory from the Austrian school (THE singular anti-Keynesian school, as opposed to Milton Friedman's Chicago-school of theory).
The problem is, if given a real option of trying a free _and unfettered_ market, some libertarians turn out to seem fearful of giving their theories an acid-test. I'm not one of that sort, and wish John or his pro-side guests could have offered a stronger support.