David Sirota calls John Stossel a bunch of nasty names on CNBC, then immediately hops on the Huffington Post (and elsewhere) to tell everyone how well he did. Oh, and to call John Stossel more names. And bash Cato.

Maybe I’m biased, but I thought Sirota came off as a pompous, breathless assclown (how’s that for name-calling?). He pushed a pedestrian “correlation equals causation” fallacy on minimum wage and job creation, the same argument advanced by Ezra Klein just last week (and ably debunked by Cato’s Will Wilkinson). On the Huffington Post, he’s all ad hominem, tossing out scaryisms wrapped in the word “corporate” like parade candy.

If Sirota ever actually read Stossel, he’d find that the guy is as hard on corporations as he is on government. Particularly corporations that use government to circumvent competition (which, naturally, gets easier as government gets bigger). And if he’d done some elementary research on Cato (he calls us “corporate-funded” and “fringe-right-wing”), he’d find that about 2% of our income last year came from corporations, a percentage that seems to fall each year, and that I’d bet dollars to donuts is lower than a good percentage of left-wing advocacy groups (for reasons that escape me, corporations love to give to organizations hostile to free markets).

As for the “fringe right-wing” charge, I guess that would explain all the cheerleading I’ve been doing for the Bush administration these last few years.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 19th, 2006 at 4:54 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.