• Save Lions. Eat them.

      Posted by John Stossel | June 24, 2010

      A restaurant in Mesa, Arizona is selling lion meat burgers. Enter the animal rights activists:

       
      Dr. Grey Stafford with the World Wildlife Zoo says that serving a threatened species sends the wrong message. "Of all the plentiful things to eat in this country, for someone to request that or to offer that... I was rather stunned," says Stafford.

       ... Animal rights advocates are expected to protest outside[the restaurant].

      But why?  Lions are listed as “threatened.”  The best way to save threatened and endangered species is to…eat them.

       The American bison are the best example.  A hundred years ago, they were on the verge of extinction. They were hunted almost to extinction because no one owned them.  It was the Tragedy of the Commons .   No one owned the bison, so no one had an incentive to protect them.

       Then ranchers began to fence in the bison and (gasp!) farm them. Today, America has half a million bison.  We don’t have a shortage of chickens, either.

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    • JOHN HAS A NEW BOOK! ORDER TODAY

    This Week's Show -- May 16, 2013

    Government is at war against the little guy.

     

    Bureaucrats pass thousands of regulations to "keep people safer" and "make the marketplace more fair." Today 170,000 pages of federal regulations are on the books. Break just one rule, and government may wreck your life.

     

    So Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson started a "Victims of Government" website that features victims of overregulation.

     

    Nevada bureaucrats tell people who teach movie make-up that they must get an expensive license or close.

     

    Stossel has two empty rooms in his house now that his kids moved out. Using sites like Roomorama, he could make a little money and rent the rooms out. But two years ago, New York passed a law that makes most of what apartment rental sites do illegal. Stossel debates Liz Kreuger, who sponsored that bill.

     

    Is there any hope for the little guy? Authors of "Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers", Edward Lopez and Wayne Leighton, point out that deregulation did happen once. Americans pay much less to fly and to ship something because the CAB and ICC no longer exist. And we have cell phones because the FCC finally allowed spectrum auction. They say the only time things change is when the right people, the right ideas and the right circumstances all come together to repeal the bureaucrats rules.

     

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