John Stossel Quotes

Public crowdfunding still suffers from a tragedy of the commons problem. Everyone will want the benefit of the crowdfunded efforts but is incentivized to sit on the sidelines and hope others chip in.

If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all?

One man will carry two buckets of water for his own use, Two men will carry one for their joint use; Three men will carry none for anybody's use.

Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it.

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate.

Behavioral economists have shown that a sizable percentage of people are willing to pay real money to punish people who are taking from a common pot but not contributing to it. Just to insure that shirkers get what they deserve, we are prepared to make ourselves poorer.

No one can expect a majority to be stirred by motives other than ignoble.

It is ... difficult to induce a number of free beings to co-operate for their mutual benefit.

We need leaders who appeal to us to think about something other than narrow self-interest but instead focus upon the greater good.

International regimes, international treaties, international norms are observed not because of the goodness of anybody but because they bring benefits. If they don't, then the longevity of those agreements come into jeopardy.

The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.

Ultimately, and I believe this is one of the fundamental problems with socialism, it's that human beings do have self-interest. It's very hard to ignore that self-interest when you're creating a government structure.

But because human being tend to focus on short-term benefits and our own immediate needs, such tragedies of the commons occur frequently .

Capitalism has given people both the liberty and the incentive to create, produce, and trade, thereby generating prosperity.

Capitalism is like Japanese Knotweed: nothing kills it off. If there were only two people left on the planet, one of them would find a way of making money out of the other.

Exploitation of the poor can be extinguished not by effecting the destruction of a few millionaires, but by removing the ignorance of the poor and teaching them to non-cooperate with their exploiters.

Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

The oil corporations spend a lot of money to get, say, the tar sands pipeline through, but nobody's - you know, there are definitely environmentalists being paid - but a lot of people are acting for something other than financial compensation. So if the tar sands pipeline doesn't get made, it's because a huge amount of people are doing something that doesn't involve remuneration, money, etc., because we're not actually the self-interested financial instruments that economists like to imagine we are.

Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.

In a world of private property, if something isn't owned by somebody, it's going to be misused by somebody else.

When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.

Ministers and merchants love nobody.

The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone's advantage.

Capital must be propelled by self-interest; it cannot be enticed by benevolence.