Columnist.
Last week I said the Environmental Protection Agency has become a monster that does more harm than good. But logical people say, "What else we got?" It's natural to assume greedy capitalists will run amok and destroy the Earth unless stopped by regulation. These critics don't understand the real power of private ownership, says Terry Anderson of the Property and Environment Research Center. "Long before the EPA was a glint in anyone's eye," said Anderson on my TV show, "property rights were dealing with pollution issues."
Thanks, Environmental Protection Agency! You've required sewage treatment plants, catalytic converters on cars and other things that made the world cleaner than the world in which I grew up. Good work. Today, America's waterways are so much cleaner that I swim in New York City's once-filthy Hudson River -- right beside skyscrapers in which millions of people, uh, flush. The air we breathe is also cleaner than it's been for 60 years. In a rational world, environmental bureaucrats would now say, "Mission accomplished. We set tough standards, so we don't need to keep doing more. Stick a fork in it! We're done."
Libertarians warned for years that government is force, that government always grows and that America's police have become too much like an occupying army. We get accused of being paranoid, but we look less paranoid after heavily armed police in Ferguson, Missouri, tear gassed peaceful protesters, arrested journalists and stopped some journalists from entering the town. One week before the rioting began, Fox News aired my documentary on the militarization of law enforcement, "Policing America."
Drones -- unmanned flying machines -- will soon fill our skies. They conjure up fears, especially among some of my fellow libertarians, of spying and death from above. These fears aren't groundless. President Bush approved the use of armed drones against suspected terrorists overseas, and President Obama vastly increased their use. Drones have killed thousands of people in places such as Pakistan and Yemen, countries against which we have not declared war. Drones keep getting more sophisticated. The Air Force is now developing what it calls MAVs, Micro Air Vehicles, tiny drones that can quietly search for an individual terrorist and then kill him with explosives or even incapacitate him with chemicals.
If I drive across a U.S. border, I expect to stop at a Border Patrol checkpoint. But imagine driving to the grocery store, or Mom's house, well inside America, and being stopped by the Border Patrol. Many Americans don't have to imagine it -- it's how they live. Even as the federal government fails to control the southern border, it sends the Border Patrol farther into the interior, where Americans complain that agents harass people who are already U.S. citizens.
I'm the underachiever in my family. My parents also produced Harvard Medical School research director Thomas Stossel. Mom called him the one who had "a real job." For years, my brother annoyed me by not embracing the libertarianism that changed my life. It bored him. He was comfortable in his Harvard cocoon. But then he realized that the anti-capitalist activists who fight with me on my TV show are also the people who make life more difficult for doctors, and for patients who want cures.
"Tea party members don't think there's a federal role in transportation!" complained Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, last week, near the site of a $5.8 million highway project. If only most tea party members were that radical. While Brown and other big-government folks worry that Republicans will cut spending, Republicans debate adding another $10.5 billion to the Highway Trust Fund to keep it going another year -- without deciding how to reform it.
Wars, plane crashes, mass murder -- it's easy to report news that happens suddenly. Reporters do a good job covering that. But we do a bad job telling you about what's really changing in the world, because we miss the stories that happen slowly. These are usually the more important stories. Recently, President Barack Obama was mocked for saying: "The world is less violent than it has ever been. It is healthier than it has ever been. It is more tolerant than it has ever been. It is better fed than it's ever been. It is more educated than it's ever been." Although these comments received criticism, he was absolutely right. Despite the current violence in the Middle East, the world today is actually less violent than it used to be. In the 21st century, about 50,000 people a year died from war -- about a third the number who died each year during the Cold War and half the number during the 1990s, a decade thought of as a time of peace and prosperity.
There's capitalism, and then there's "crapitalism" -- crony capitalism. Capitalism is great because it lets entrepreneurs raise money so they can scale up and get their products and services to more people. If there is free competition, innovators with the best ideas raise the most money, and the best and cheapest products spread far and wide. But it's crapitalism when politicians give your tax money and other special privileges to businesses that are "most deserving of help." Often those businesses turn out to be run by politicians' cronies.
Reporter Sharyl Attkisson's story sounds familiar to me: A major network got tired of her reports criticizing government. She no longer works there. The CBS correspondent reported on Fast and Furious, the shifting explanation for the Benghazi, Libya, attacks and the bungled rollout of the Obamacare website. "But as time went on, it was harder to get stories on," she says. "There are people who simply would rather just avoid the headache of going after powers that be because of the pushback that comes with it, which has become very organized and well-financed," she says on my TV show this week.
Ray Kurzweil -- inventor of things like machines that turn text into speech -- has popularized the idea that we are rapidly approaching "the singularity," the point at which machines not only think for themselves but develop intellectually faster than we. At that point, maybe we no longer talk about "human history." It will be "machine progress," with us along for the ride -- if machines keep us around. Maybe they'll keep us in a zoo, like we do with our monkey ancestors. Scientists and ethicists are beginning to wrestle with the question of how to make sure artificial intelligence, when it arrives, is nice to us.
Both libertarians and conservatives want to keep America safe. We differ on how best to do that. Most libertarians believe our attempts to create or support democracy around the world have made us new enemies, and done harm as well as good. We want less military spending. Some conservatives respond to that by calling us isolationists, but we're not. I want to participate in the world; I just don't want to run it. I'm glad Americans trade with other countries -- trade both goods and people. It's great we sell foreigners our music, movies, ideas, etc. And through dealing with them, we also learn from what they do best. On my TV show this week, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton will tell me why my libertarian skepticism about the importance of a "strong military presence" is "completely irrelevant to foreign policy decision-making."
"Young people are exploited!" "Income mobility is down!" "Poor people are locked into poverty!" Those are samples of popular nonsense peddled today. Leftist economist Thomas Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" has been No. 1 on best-seller lists for weeks (with 400 pages of statistics, I assume "Capital" is bought more often than it is read). Piketty argues that investments grow faster than wages and so the rich get richer far faster than everyone else. He says we should impose a wealth tax and 80 percent taxes on rich people's incomes.
It's easy to scare people about what's in their food, but the danger is almost never real. And the fear itself kills. Take the panic over genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Ninety percent of all corn grown in America is genetically modified now. That means it grew from a seed that scientists altered by playing with its genes. The new genes may make corn grow faster, or they may make it less appetizing to bugs so farmers can use fewer pesticides. This upsets some people. GMOs are "unnatural," they say. A scene from the movie "Seeds of Death" warns that eating GMOs "causes holes in the GI tract" and "causes multiple organ system failure."
Are you worried about the future? It's hard not to be. If you watch the news, you mostly see violence, disasters, danger. Some in my business call it "fear porn" or "pessimism porn." People like the stuff; it makes them feel alive and informed. Of course, it's our job to tell you about problems. If a plane crashes -- or disappears -- that's news. The fact that millions of planes arrive safely is a miracle, but it's not news. So we soak in disasters -- and warnings about the next one: bird flu, global warming, potential terrorism. I won Emmys hyping risks but stopped winning them when I wised up and started reporting on the overhyping of risks. My colleagues didn't like that as much.
It's wedding season! More Americans get married in June than in other months. Why June? The timing seems pretty arbitrary if you look up its history. Some claim it's because June was named after Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage. Others say it's because in the 1500s, people took their annual bath in May, which meant they probably smelled best around this time of year. (Be thankful for modern times.) A third and more plausible explanation: If a bride got pregnant in June, she wouldn't be too big during summer to help with growing and harvesting food.
Last week, when the NBA banned racist team owner Donald Sterling, some said: "What about free speech? Can't a guy say what he thinks anymore?" The answer: yes, you can. But the free market may punish you. In America today, the market punishes racists aggressively. This punishment is not "censorship." Censorship is something only governments can do. Writers complain that editors censor what they write. But that's not censorship; that's editing.
Did you know that I started Facebook? Really! Well, sort of ... When I was in college at all-male Princeton, I tried to make money by adding photos to a snarky guide to neighboring girls' schools. The guide had been a profitable publishing success, and my idea was simply to add the girls' pictures. Schools like Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, etc., already published those pictures, so all I had to do was get permission from administrators at those schools. Surprisingly, they gave it to me. Unfortunately for me and my "Face Book," there was no Internet then. So I don't own a company worth $180 billion. The book, "Who the Girls Are," was a flop. Oh, well.
Scarlett Johansson left nude photos of herself on her computer. A hacker grabbed them and sent them to gossip websites. A Pennsylvania high school issued laptop computers to students and then remotely activated the laptops' cameras to watch the students when they were away from school. On my computer, a program called Disconnect reveals that my favorite websites spy on me and track what I like to read, what I browse, what I buy.
