A well-written and powerful article Adam; I enjoyed reading it.
speaking of fox, I have been disappointed with the tv version of Judge Napolitano’s show. He was already a bit of a screamer, but he has become even more so now that he is on tv. He bring up like 100 topics of the day and talks about them for 5 seconds. Asks strange ‘cornering’ questions to opponents and soft balls to people with the same ideas. Ron Paul has been only really quality guest so far. He has an entire hour, I would hope he would switch to giving half his time to the ‘libertarian take’ on the events of the week, and then the other half hour going into some sort of detail on libertarian thinking.
The judge is great and principled, but I really hope his show changes direction, its currently lacking in entertainment and education. Stossel, who is much less principled, and has a much more educational format, even though I also think his show moves too fast at times
Agreed–I saw Napolitano’s first two shows and they were very disappointing. I preferred his old show, even though it had a lower production value.
I like Stossel’s show though. Given his colleagues, it’s hard to see Stossel as anything but an ally. Plus, he’s becoming more principled as time goes on. The biggest step for most people seems to be moving from constitutionalism to voluntaryism.
I think Napolitano’s heart is in the right place, I don’t think he is intentionally misleading people like Beck is(IMO). I haven’t watched Stossel, for some reason he irks me, I think from some other show or interview but I have nothing to back that up.
Oh and thanks for the complement Aquila, while I am a long way from where I want to be, I have made it my goal to eliminate partisanship among the seekers of liberty, it is the key to exposing the lies of the statists.
Napolitano is misleading people?
No, I don’t think he is.
I believe Beck is a performer and nothing else, he puts on a show.
I heard Napolitano speak at CPAC and my intuition tells me he is genuine.
I’ve heard Rush mention Mises on a few occasions, he cannot stand Ron Paul, though.
^ Woah! What’d he have to say about it?
I have heard Rush urging his listeners to read Hayek and Mises to understand why the Stimulus, etc, is doomed to fail… it’s tough for me to believe that he’s actually read much of them himself, though.
Well the way I figure it, it’s like liberty student said about Fox News. Conservatives have a tendency to be somewhat libertarian when Democrats are in office. As soon as Republicans are running the executive branch, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll revert back to statolatry. Limbaugh never talked about Mises or Hayek when Bush was in office.
I enjoy listening to the Freedom Watch podcasts, and Napolitano was excellent when he was standing in for Glenn Beck. I agree that his new show is disappointing, but I chalk that more up to Fox trying to kill the show early by shoving it onto a saturday morning slot, and shoving in as many “rating spikes”(Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, the usual neocons) as they can
I’m surprised Ron Paul was able to get on at all.
I used to enjoy watching Stossel, but he’s revealed himself to be far more of a freedmanite than I first realized. Seriously, a couple of weeks ago he had an episode dedicated to WORSHIPPING the man.
Yes Stossel is a big time Freidmanite, but he normally sticks to the low hanging fruit stuff where Austrians and Chicago folks would agree.
Ron Paul isn’t a controversial guest so I wasn’t surprised he was on, he does all kinds of shows.
Its seems like the LvMI guests have dried up ever since the judge made it to actual tv. He better hurry up, or else Beck will beat him. Tom Woods and Bob Murphy seem to do well when they need to mainstream while also not going against their principles. Especially Tom, he can sound like a constitutionalist whenever he wants and has a whole rolladex of historical stories he could bring up for any topic.
He had an entire episode dedicated to WORSHIPING Ayn Rand and another one on the Road to Serfdom and Hayek. Does that mean he’s an Objectivist or an Austrian? Maybe, maybe not. Granted he’s not going to have an episode dedicated to Rothbard any time soon, but Rothbardians are only a small part of the libertarian community.
Granted, Stossel is still in the classical liberal framework of “limited, constitutional government.” But hey, I’ll take a classical liberal over a socialist or a neocon (I repeat myself) any day.