Give Him a Break

The Conning Tower ^ | Feb, 18, 2004 | Trentino

[Davis]

Last Friday evening, John Stossel came to the Barnes & Noble at 82nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan to sell and sign his new book, Give Me a Break. I was there along with a full house, about a hundred assorted Upper West Siders. Mr. Stossel is a resident of the neighborhood, too, and his present place of employment, ABC, has extensive facilities about a mile downtown. It was a good natured, mostly mature group. Mature, gray hair--but no walkers.

After a short introduction by a Barnes & Noble staffer, Mr. Stossel took the lectern and introduced himself. He looks the same in person on the second floor of Barnes & Noble as he does on 20/20: crisp, smart, pleasant, prepared.

He told us the story of his hegira from consumer affairs reporter who exposed the lies, half-truths, and outright scams of business to his present status as critic of the flimflams, scams, and multitudinous outrages carried out regularly by government. His reception by liberals during his consumer affairs years, he said, was enthusiastic, but when he began to question the proper province of government, he ran into trouble. He was breaking ranks, see, testing the dogma that continually increases the scope and expense of government is the route to travel to solve the problems of human existence.

Mr. Stossel's audience last Friday, I remind you, was drawn from the 8th Congressional, at one time the home turf of Bella Abzug, now represented by Jerrold Nadler, the same Upper West Side where the Eleventh Commandment is observed. Still, John Stossel was greeted with sympathetic laughter when he decried the bureaucratic snafu that trumped the building of snazzy toilet kiosks of superior design on the sidewalks of New York.

Three such convenience-kiosks were installed as an experiment in public relief during the mayoralty of Edward I. Koch and proved satisfactory. But they were uninstalled after three months. Thirteen separate city agencies would have to approve each kiosk location, and there were complaints that the kiosks were too small to accommodate citizens with wheelchairs, that male users would fail to lift the seats, and so forth, so that none were ever installed.

Mr. Stossel met approving nods when he assailed, as he does in his book, the casualties of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). His argument is based on his considerable passion for freedom, individual freedom to act peaceably in what each considers to be his own best interest. He pointed out that it now takes on average about 15 years and $500 million to bring a potentially life saving drug to market. He argues, much as I did in WAARR that adults ought to be able to make their own life-and-death choices.

During the question and answer period that followed Stossel's remarks, a number of questioners showed familiarity with the contents of Give Me a Break. Like me, they'd read it and liked it. They showed their approval of his approach, his understanding that when you shove a government program at what is deemed a social problem you haven't solved it, you've made a trade-off, generally not a winning trade because now you're faced with the problems your solution has generated. When a government solution fails, Mr. Stossel reminded us, the usual solution to that failure is to increase the size of the program.

His book is valuable if at times overly glib. I realize that Give Me a Break isn't a treatise, but I found his arguments for drug and prostitution legalization themselves dogmatic and insufficiently concerned with his solutions' problems. Read the book. Judge for yourself.