THIS WEEK’S OP-ED, I MEAN TV CRITIC

Tom Shales can be a funny and tart tv critic, but his review of John Stossel’s populist take on big government strikes me as somewhat beyond the pale. The Washington Post often passes off leftist rhetoric as “Style-writing” (you should have read their description of Katherine Harris!) but this one was enough to make even me take a deep breath. Here’s a typical extract: “Many of Stossel’s revelations are … bogus unless you’re capable of being shocked by such scoops as the fact that taxes are too high. No! Say it isn’t so! … You’re unlikely to fall out of your easy chair, either, when you hear that the military establishment wastes money, that “billions slip through the cracks” every year? “Isn’t it time to try something new?” asks Stossel after ticking off more examples of government waste and error. What does he mean by “something new,” though – balkanizing the United States into a group of smaller countries? No, he’s advocating that risky old cure-all, privatization. Private enterprise thrives on competition, he says, and thus has more impetus to be efficient. The government, by contrast, is a lazy monopoly. Apparently Stossel hasn’t been following the news much lately or keeping up with the epidemic of mergers that is making giant companies into mammoth corporations into humongous conglomerates that are a virtual government unto themselves. The real government often seems powerless to oppose them, as in the debacle at the gas pump or the current power shortage in California. Would anybody but John Stossel argue for more deregulation at this point?” Er, yes, Tom. I would for one. Shales veers from saying that Stossel’s criticisms of government waste are a) old news and b) wrong. But he doesn’t show they’re wrong (in fact he implies they’re right); and he doesn’t prove that they’re not still relevant. Heck, I haven’t stopped paying taxes just because someone already did a story on government waste in 1995. And then there’s Shales’s simple political and economic illiteracy. Does he really think high gas prices are the result of “privatisation?” Does he even have a clue about why California’s half-assed deregulation of electricity failed? Or are his editors such knee-jerk liberals that they let this half-baked blather go unchecked?