I rarely watch cable news anymore. It’s all hysteria, all the time.

CNN: “We are destroying the planet.”

View Comments (1)

MSNBC: “The middle class is disappearing!”

President Donald Trump says drug trafficking “is worse than ever!”

Congress is trying to ramrod through increased gun laws upon the American people. But will that really stop the rise of gun violence?

I’m glad my favorite magazine, Reason, cuts through the gloom and tells us the truth:

There is less war and more food. We live healthier and longer lives. HIV will soon be history. We are increasingly free to be whoever we are and love whom we want. Even work has become more pleasant.

It’s a surprising message, since most journalists tell us everything’s terrible.

“They’re wrong,” says Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason’s editor-in-chief, in my new video.

Why is the media so negative?

Mangu-Ward says evolution wired us to see a world in which things are bad. “If you are a caveman who hears a little rustling in the weeds and you say, ‘Oh, it’s probably fine’ and the other guy says, ‘It’s probably a tiger!’ that’s the guy who lives. That guy was our ancestor.”

So today, as life gets better, my profession wins clicks and ratings points by hyping whatever makes us afraid. Reporters ignore gradual improvement and, sometimes, miracles.

“We live in a world of reliable miracles,” says Mangu-Ward. “When I’m having a bad day, I trawl the internet for videos of happy cyborgs … hearing-impaired people getting cochlear implants turned on for the first time … paraplegics walking with the help of adaptive prosthetics, infants getting their first pair of coke-bottle glasses … things that, in another era, would have caused the founding of an entire religion!”

OK, so science moves forward, but how will we pay for it? News anchors tell us “the middle class is shrinking.”

That’s true, says Mangu-Ward, “because people are getting richer!” A chart in Reason shows that Americans moving out of the middle class mostly moved up. There are more high-income people than ever before and fewer low-income households.

“A couple hundred years ago, work was dangerous. It was very easy to die at work,” she reminds us. “Work was extremely boring, even for people that had good jobs. Jobs are pretty interesting now, and they mostly don’t kill you, and we should be grateful for that.”

Markets allow every individual a choice. Products and services must improve, or you won’t buy them. That’s why market competition brings us gradual improvements. Politics, by contrast, gives us just two choices. Then it forces everyone to obey whatever the majority chose. “At Reason [we] describe why everyone should have less power over each other … because people are going to make mistakes and hurt each other. Better that they shouldn’t do it with the force of the state behind them,” concludes Mangu-Ward.

She suspects life will continue to get better “if we can just manage to keep politicians from screwing it up.”

(Excerpt from The Daily Signal.  Article by John Stossel.)