Interview: John Stossel Says The President Should Be Able To Fire The Bureaucracy

What fundamental shift in your thinking about governance in politics led you to switch focus from big business problems to government problems?

I watched government f**k things up. Coming out of college, I naively believed that government would fix problems. Then, as a young reporter, I saw government not always make things worse but, over time, make things worse. It created bureaucratic obstacles with unintended side effects.

As I read more about capitalism and libertarianism, I realized that competition does it much better. But nobody in the media was getting it: media love government. It’s intuitive to the lazy thinker that if you pass a law meant to do ‘X,’ it will do ‘X.’ Instead, it does a little X, but also does some Y and Z, which create new problems.

Many young people experienced the pandemic, lockdowns, and political division. They’ve experienced corporate brute force in terms of censorship. The idea of free markets has become less appealing in the pursuit of free speech. Elon Musk revived it with X, and suddenly there’s competition. How should young people approach solving these problems?

Well, some are already solved. There is pushback now toward the stupidness of social media canceling.

Certainly, government isn’t the solution. If government had stepped in a few years ago, it would have banned all kinds of speech. Government is forced, let’s not forget. Everything else is a free choice.

We do need some government to keep us safe, punish enemies, protect against fraud, and set environmental rules because there’s no market incentive to behave well: often, your pollution ends up in somebody else’s yard. But outside that, people will solve issues on their own.

Regarding your recent video about Trump and his unsuccessful attempts to drain the swamp, he’s coming back now, campaigning on firing large swaths of bureaucrats through Schedule F and removing protections for the bureaucracy.

He’s talking about firing a lot of people?

Yeah, Milei’s Argentina is an example. Republicans think it's great, and Democrats think it's an authoritarian level of executive power. Should we empower the executive in such cases?

It should be the President's right to fire people, but we have civil service rules which make it impossible. Millions of people work for the government — many useless and harmful. I don't believe Trump would actually fire them, but it would be good if he did. If the public doesn't like it, they can elect somebody else.

Republicans DeSantis, Vivek, and Trump advocated for firing millions of bureaucrats. Democrats recently acted to make firing civil service workers more difficult, after seeing Republican plans.

DeSantis banned artificial meat. That requires more bureaucrats, so that’s not shrinking government.

Businesses have been criticized for taking political sides over the years. Disney pushed back against DeSantis’s legislation, and DeSantis hit them hard. A lot of Republicans were surprised to see someone challenge corporations. What do you think?

DeSantis is a big disappointment to me because he doesn’t seem to believe in freedom. I’m a libertarian. If you’re spending your own money, you should be allowed to implement whatever stupid rules you want. People who don’t like them either won’t work for your company or won’t buy your products.

The Daily Wire’s rise is a good example, in tandem with Disney’s declining favor. What should the top priorities of the incoming president be?

Put Medicare and Social Security on a sustainable course, which means rescinding some promises, reducing annual increases, and indexing retirement age to lifespans.

Then, shrink the Labor Department, the Agriculture Department, and the Commerce Department. These operations auto pilot: you don't need a government department telling people what to do. It's destructive dead weight.

Reforms for those federal programs align with Republican values, but anyone who campaigns in favor gets pushback and retreats. Even globally, France tried to increase the retirement age, and people protested en masse.

So, how do you deal with the fact that if nothing changes, the younger generation will suffer, while older people won’t elect you if you promote financial solvency? Is this a messaging problem? Does this require a reality check?

Yes, I think it's messaging. Older people like me are often lazy and stupid. We think, “Hey, I paid into these programs, I'm getting my money back.” My peers don't realize we're getting much more back than we paid. And we're living so much longer. When Social Security began, most people my age had been dead for 10 years.

If a president took time to explain how we're ripping off younger people, older people might vote differently. But I don't blame them for being chicken because elections are always close, and young people don't vote in the numbers that we do.

What advice would you give a younger generation that has seen only the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations?

My narcissism says you don't worry about it until you're older and have more life experience, when your ideas will be more formed by fact. I was always puzzled at Princeton that I had colleagues who knew undoubtedly that the war in Vietnam was right and others, even more so, just knew that the Domino Theory was evil.

How did they know? They didn't know anything. We were all kids: we were worried about women, sports, money, and music. Suddenly, we're supposed to have strong political opinions based on what? So I would say, chill out. And read Reason Magazine to get a libertarian perspective.

How would you dispel the notion that things have never been worse for America?

Psychologically, I'm a pessimist. But I survived so many potential disasters not manifesting that my intellect finally convinced me to be optimistic. Every year, the media hypes horrible possibilities.

We're always about to die from something, yet it almost never happens: flesh-eating bacteria, killer bees from Brazil, cell phones causing brain cancer. We’ve seen the tumors and watched reporters interview scientists who really believe it. Data convinces us that it's happening and, of course, it’s front page news. But it has never happened.

I'm skeptical about scares. Climate change seems to be a genuine scare, while COVID was more nonsense. A few scares were real.

Given that we keep living longer and poor people keep climbing out of poverty, things do get better. The phone you're recording me on is an example of things getting better, and I assume the trend will continue.

What are you optimistic about? And what else would you tell Generation Z?

I've been wrong about this: I thought Arab Spring or the invention of social media was going to make things so much better because the dictator couldn't keep secrets from people anymore, and crazy religious cults would go away. But the spread of information is a good thing and, in the long run, it makes things better.

Young people should enjoy the fact that they have more choices. You don't have to worry about where food comes from, and climate change can be adjusted. Seventy years ago, the Dutch built dikes with crummy technology. The most densely populated country in Europe would be a third underwater if not for these old dikes.

You have a good future. Go have children so the population doesn't die out.