Give Me a Break CD: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media...

Stossel, John

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9780060585679: Give Me a Break CD: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media...

ISBN 10: 0060585676 ISBN 13: 9780060585679

Publisher: HarperAudio, 2004

Ballooning government? Millionaire welfare queens? Tort lawyers run amok? A $330,000 outhouse, paid for with your tax dollars? John Stossel says, "Give me a break."

When he hit the airwaves thirty years ago, Stossel chased snake-oil peddlers, rip-off artists, and corporate thieves, winning the applause of his peers.

But along the way, he noticed that there was something far more troublesome going on: While the networks screamed about the dangers of coffee pots, worse risks were ignored.

In Give Me a Break, Stossel explains how ambitious bureaucrats, intellectually lazy reporters, and greedy lawyers make your life worse even as they claim to protect your interests. Taking on such sacred cows as the FDA, the War on Drugs, and scare-mongering environmental activists -- and backing up his trademark irreverence with careful reasoning and research -- he shows how the problems that government tries and fails to fix can be solved better by the extraordinary power of the free market.

He traces his journey from cub reporter to 20/20 co-anchor, revealing his battles to get his ideas to the public, his struggle to overcome stuttering, and his eventual realization that, for years, much of his reporting missed the point.

Stossel concludes the book with a modest proposal for change. It's a simple plan in the spirit of the Founding Fathers to ensure that America remains a place "where free minds -- and free markets -- make good things happen."

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About the Author:

John Stossel is co-anchor of ABC's 20/20. He also hosts ABC's John Stossel Specials reports for ABC radio, and ABCNews.com. A graduate of Princeton University, Stossel lives in New York City with his wife and two children. He devotes his time to beach volleyball, youth soccer, and his family.

From Booklist:

Stossel, the well-known television correspondent, was one of the first consumer reporters, sticking up for the little folks who got scammed by quack doctors, envelope-stuffing schemes, and the like. But he found himself frustrated. He would expose the bad guys, and the next month they would be back in business. Why, he asked, can't government step in and help? "The more reporting I did," Stossel writes, "the more it dawned on me that the government is often the problem, not the solution." His book, drawn from his television pieces, is full of stories of government gone mad: entrepreneurs put out of business because they violated a ridiculous regulation; competition unfairly quashed by regulators acting in the interests of lobby groups; laws interpreted so narrowly that they become ludicrous. Rapidly, he went from an intrepid consumer reporter to--in the eyes of his critics--a turncoat who abandoned the cherished liberal belief in the ability of government to help people. Although the book is clearly one man's opinion, Stossel is very persuasive. His thesis is simple: there is nothing government can do that the private sector can't do better, more efficiently, and cheaper. We are being ripped off, he laments, by excessive taxation, incompetent and bloated bureaucracies, and politicians who make decisions based on self-interest rather than public interest. It's a powerful, well-argued, and immensely thought-provoking book, and with Stossel's visibility, not to mention the incendiary subject matter, it's sure to be a hot one, too. David Pitt
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