America: The Land of the Freeloaders

[Teh One Who Knocks]

I watched this show over the weekend. John Stossel is great. He is pretty much as true to Libertarian views as there is out there and this show opened my eyes and made me mad at the same time.

It's about 42 minutes give or take, but it's well worth watching IMHO.

Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OQjlzh279E

Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkxukIvzmR4

Part 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE-Rqvk6rmM

Part 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP-XZrK8RRI

[DemonGeminiX]

42 minutes. Well...

[Teh One Who Knocks]

42 minutes. Well...

Watch it :slap:

[Deepsepia]

42 minutes. Well...

Its a good piece, worth watching. I very much like Stossel, there should be more folks like him on TV. He's not exactly right wing or left wing-- he's really a Libertarian, and always has been. And I really like that he digs into the facts, and examines the issue in a bunch of different settings.

The only place where I disagree with Stossel is on folks defaulting on their mortgages. You're responsible for keeping your end of the bargain in a mortgage-- if your mortgage is secured only by the property, and the property is worth less than the mortgage -- well yes, then it does make sense to walk away, and I don't see what's wrong with it.

You are responsible for adhering to the terms of a deal you signed, and if it says, "you have to pay, and the penalty if you don't pay is that we take your house" -- well, that's what you and the bank agreed to-- its not like you're "taking advantage of" the bank, you're just following the rules of a contract they wrote.

[AntZ]

Funny how John Stossel was admired and awarded by the left when he exposed waste and corruption from the Reagan and Bush (41) administrations. Then he started annoying those same "balanced" managing editors at ABC when he would do it to the Clinton Admin. He was finally driven out of 20/20 when he exposed lies from the environmental radicals, the rest of the media was promoting. After he joins FOX, suddenly he was cast out of the "real journalist" cabal! Now the lefties blast him and try to shut him down like they did Beck.

[Deepsepia]

I'd add one more problem wit Stossel -- and libertarian economic thought. In this piece on "Freeloaders", he also takes a swipe at anti-trust law, arguing against the Justice Department's fight with Microsoft.

Seems to me to be a completely different issue than "freeloading", so it doesn't really fit with the rest of hi piece. It's also a real weakness of libertarian thought generally . . . They typically claim that somehow "the market" will solve the problem of monopolies in things like operating systems. We have enough experience with software to know that that simply isn't true. Companies like Microsoft, Intel, and IBM all have pursued very aggressive strategies not to provide better products, but to harm competitors offering competing products, or to harm those who do business with them.

We've also got a lot of experience showing that companies, in the absence of vigorous anti-trust activity, willl either monopolize or form cartels-- on that's consistent with economic logic -- why wouldn't they? The set way to increase profitability in a mature market is to eliminate a price cutting competitor.

[FBD]

:lol: