No, says the government of my state.

New York recently passed a law making it very difficult for people to offer short-term rentals via popular websites like Airbnb and Roomorama, which connect room-owners and room-renters. I could be fined $25,000 if I rent to tourists through those services.

New York State Sen. Liz Krueger defended the law.

“Tenants all over the city are begging their legislators for help. They were being harassed by strangers in the middle of night entering their building, moving into the apartments next door … violating the fire code, the safety code, and harassing people, sometimes very aggressively, out of the buildings.”

Please. Of course some renters behave badly. But they can be dealt with by building owners. There’s no need for authoritarian governments to ban consenting adults from renting to each other.

Krueger says that despite these services’ rapid growth, their customers are unhappy – and that despite the online customer-satisfaction reviews and ratings that enable everyone to compare thousands of different offerings, and blacklist renters and homeowners who behave badly, customers are being duped.

“They think they’re signing up for a hotel room. They pay through a credit card. They walk into a situation that is not safe, not clean.”

This is how politicians think.

Jia En Teo, co-founder of Roomorama, has a different explanation for why businesses like hers are attacked by politicians: “Short-term rentals have been growing in popularity … that has posed competition to hotels.”

At age 26, Teo left a job at Bloomberg media to start Roomorama. She understood business – but didn’t have political pull. Big hotel chains and their unions do. They have lobbyists who pressure legislators. The Hotel Association of New York says people who use sites like Roomorama risk their safety.

John Stossel’s logic is undeniable and refreshing – don’t miss his newest book, “No, They Can’t Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed”

But despite such fearmongering, Roomorama hasn’t been squashed. It now operates in 5,000 cities around the world. Tourists get to use empty apartments and pay less. They get a novel experience. Property owners make money. Win-win!

But Roomorama threatens the status quo. Hotels and hotel unions don’t like it. Regulators who issue permits to hotels don’t like it. So the established businesses, the insiders, work with friendly politicians to craft rules that crush the newcomers.

Economists call that process “regulatory capture.” It happened even during the New Deal. FDR railed against “the money interests” and pushed through regulations controlling what businesses could do, including establishing a minimum wage, maximum hours, agreed-upon production levels and minimum prices for each industry, to eliminate “cutthroat competition.” Working at night was forbidden. Government enforcers made surprise inspections and could seize control of businesses on the spot.

It turned out that most of those regulations were shaped by big business itself, because the established businesses didn’t want competition, and both business and regulators like predictability.

Even when regulators mean well – when they worry about safety or whether customers get basic services – regulations are based on the old, familiar ways of doing things, simply because regulators don’t know anything else. That’s great for old, familiar firms – but bad for the innovative start-up that wants to try something different. And bad for consumers who might have benefited.

The new idea might be a bad one, but if it is, it will die on its own. Market competition will kill it.

But the new idea might be the next Microsoft. Or Roomorama. Or Lyft, a ride-sharing app that helps people find cars without having to use (heavily regulated) local taxi cartels. Like a Roomorama for cars, Lyft lets most any car owner give people rides. It, too, faces regulatory opposition.

Regulators always say they must protect the “little guy.” But it’s the little guys who are most hurt by these rules.

Something can always go wrong – with businesses new or old. But unless we allow innovators and their customers to try new things, we’ll be stuck in the past.

Then the fat cats win, not the little guy.

Compare yourself to the man on the $20 bill: Andrew Jackson, our seventh president.

During the Revolutionary War, Jackson volunteered to fight. He was just 13 years old at the time. The British captured him and made him a servant for British officers. When one ordered Jackson to clean his boots, Jackson refused, and the officer slashed Jackson’s hand with a sword. When Jackson became president, he showed off the scar.

Jackson had grit.

Do your kids have that much grit today? I doubt it. Parents now try to protect kids from all danger. In New York City, some won’t let teenagers go to school by themselves.

Lenore Skenazy, author of “Free-Range Kids,” thinks that’s absurd.

“Free-range kids are kids we believe in,” she told me. “They can do things on their own.”

Once she allowed her own 9-year-old to ride the subway alone. After she wrote about that, she was labeled “World’s Worst Mom.” Really. Google “world’s worst mom.” Skenazy’s name comes up.

“Free-Range Kids” promotes events like “Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day.” Skenazy says leaving kids in the park without adult supervision teaches them grit. Kids get used to bugs, rocks and a lack of constant supervision. They become leaders by discovering how to organize their own lives without parents bossing them around.

And they are not likely to be kidnapped. The horror of what happened to the three women in Cleveland makes all of us more frightened of sexual assaults and other threats. Skenazy says that today’s parents are so frightened that only 6 percent allow young kids to play outside unsupervised. But the risk of harm is small, and we put our kids at greater risk, says Skenazy, if we don’t allow them the freedom to learn from their own mistakes – to acquire grit.

John Stossel’s logic is undeniable and refreshing — don’t miss his newest book, “No, They Can’t Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed”

It shouldn’t surprise me that parents want to shelter their kids from all risk. The parents themselves live in a society where risk is less and less acceptable. We expect regulations to protect us from accidents. We expect police to protect us from every imaginable criminal threat. We demand welfare, unemployment insurance and bailouts to protect every level of society from economic risk. When something goes wrong, we sue.

It wasn’t always like this.

Our country’s founders left relatively safe places to tough it out in the wilderness, to turn what a character in a John Wayne movie called “empty land used for nothin’” into ranches and farms. Doing that required long days spent hunting, plowing, fighting off enemies, digging in through cold winters, sometimes starving, losing children, losing wives and husbands – it took grit to create American civilization.

Grit requires delaying gratification, wanting something bigger than yourself.

As John Wayne’s character himself put it in “The Big Trail”: “We’re building a nation. We’ve got to suffer. No great trail was ever blazed without hardship. That’s life.”

Grit is the stuff of life. Greatness is often achieved only after repeated failure.

Cartoonist Charles Schulz had every cartoon he submitted to his high school yearbook rejected. “Peanuts” later became one of the most successful cartoons of all time.

Thomas Edison’s teachers told his mom he was “too stupid to learn.” Edison went on to accumulate 1,000 U.S. patents. His success with the light bulb followed 1,000 unsuccessful attempts. That’s grit.

It’s great that we live in a wealthy country – one with a welfare state so big that we now worry about poor people getting fat. But what makes most people happy is not comfort. It’s earned success, success you struggle for.

The opposite of earned success, says psychologist Martin Seligman, is “learned helplessness.” In lab experiments, when good things occurred that weren’t earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people’s happiness. It produced helplessness. People gave up, became passive.

That passivity (and America’s welfare state) is a threat to our future. Everyone goes through pain and loss. We face obstacles. It’s the struggle to overcome obstacles that matters.

That’s the stuff of life – and the route to happiness and prosperity.

It’s good that we can move! Moving provides one of the few limits on the megalomania of state bureaucrats.

Americans have moved away from high-taxed, heavily regulated states to lower-taxed, less-regulated states. Most don’t think of it as a political decision. They just go where opportunities are, and that usually means where there’s less government.

They’re leaving my state, New York, in droves. California, despite its great weather, also lost people and wealth. Other biggest losers were Illinois, New Jersey and Ohio.

Travis Brown, author of “Money Walks,” tracked the movements using IRS data. On my TV show, he revealed that Florida was the state that gained the most: “You’re seeing a massive amount of people and their income coming in: $86 billion.”

Arizona and Texas also gained, which made me wonder if Americans just move to states where it’s warm. “No,” said Darcy Olsen, president of Arizona’s Goldwater Institute. “Weather explains just 5 percent of the migration … the Census Bureau asks, and they say, ‘to find a job.’”

People move where jobs are, and the states gaining the most – which also include North Carolina and Nevada – follow what she calls “the magic formula. Lower taxes and good labor policy, which means, to a business, being free to hire and fire the people you want. (In) the most successful states you see both – no income tax or low taxes coupled with right-to-work laws.”

John Stossel’s logic is undeniable and refreshing – don’t miss his newest book, “No, They Can’t Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed”

This competition between states makes it possible for states to learn from each other’s successes.

T.W. Shannon, speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, told me what he’s learned. His state, where the economy had long been sluggish, finally figured out they could spur growth with tax cuts.

“We are moving to reduce our state income tax rate. … Every time we have done it in the past, we have seen increased revenues and growth.” Shannon adds, “Capital won’t flow to a hostile environment.”

No, it won’t. You’d think politicians would figure that out. But they rarely do. Brown’s income data show that capital flows to friendly environments: “States like (Texas, without a state income tax) gained $146 billion, whereas the reverse, the states with the highest among personal income-tax rates, lost over $120 billion.”

The owners of the basketball team the Houston Rockets give prospective players pamphlets that detail how many Rolex watches and Bentleys they could buy just from tax money they’d save if they move to Texas.

These data don’t stop a prominent pundit in my state, the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, from writing that the Texas economic miracle is “a myth” because Texas still has high poverty rates, a high high-school dropout rate and a low percentage of people with health insurance.

Behind this clash is the larger disagreement about how to handle the economy – promote growth by shrinking government or boost public services for the poor. The state-by-state contrast keeps getting sharper. Crudely put, blue states keep getting bluer, and red states keep getting redder. Krugman looks at Texas and sees policies – and Republican politicians – he doesn’t like.

But people don’t just vote at the ballot box or by their choice of newspaper subscriptions. They vote with their feet. And by that measure, the state that publishes Krugman’s columns – New York – and the state where he’s a college professor – New Jersey – are losing big-time.

Ironically, one reason Texas continues to have problems with poverty, despite its population growth, is that people don’t just move between states. They also move from other countries in search of opportunity. For about a million people, that meant moving across the border from Mexico to Texas. They start low on the economic ladder but do tend to move upward over time.

For some reason, politicians most sympathetic to those immigrants are clueless about why U.S. citizens move from state to state.

Let people live where they can be free, and get rich.

Many people lazily assume that the law will do roughly what it promises: give insurance to the uninsured and lower the cost of health care by limiting spending on dubious procedures.

Don’t count on it.

Consider just the complexity: The act itself is more than 906 pages long, and again and again in those 906 pages are the words, “the Secretary shall promulgate regulations …”

“Secretary” refers to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. Her minions have been busy. They’ve already added 20,000 pages of rules. They form a stack seven feet high, and more are to come.

Our old health-care system was already a bureaucratic and regulatory nightmare. It had 16,000 different codes for different ailments. Under our new, “improved” system, there will be more than a 100,000.

Government likes to think regulations can account for every possibility. Injured at a chicken coop? The code for that will be Y9272. Fall at an art gallery? That means you are a Y92250. There are three different codes for walking into a lamppost – depending on how often you’ve walked into lampposts. This is supposed to give government a more precise way to reimburse doctors for treating people and alert us to surges in injuries that might inspire further regulation.

On Government-Planned World, this makes sense. But it will be no more successful than Soviet central planning.

Compare all that to a tiny part of American medicine that is still free-market: Lasik eye surgery.

John Stossel’s logic is undeniable and refreshing — don’t miss his newest book, “No, They Can’t Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed”

Its quality has improved, while costs dropped 25 percent. Lasik (and cosmetic surgery) are specialties that provide a better consumer experience because they are a market. Patients pay directly, so doctors innovate constantly to please them. Lasik doctors even give patients their cellphone numbers.

President Obama didn’t kill American free-market health care. It began dying during World War II, when government imposed wage and price controls. At first, companies said, “Great, stability!” But then they realized that they could not attract better workers without raises. So companies got around the rules, as companies do. They gave “benefits,” like health insurance.

Government then distorted the market further by giving employer-based health insurance better tax treatment than coverage you buy yourself.

But employer-based insurance is nuts. Many workers feel locked into their jobs. Company insurance largely destroyed the health-care free market, since employees rarely shop for the best service at the lowest price.

Now Obamacare may kill what’s left of that market.

Maybe we will soon be like Canada, where some people wait years for treatment. A producer from my TV show went to a Canadian town where the town clerk pulls names out of a box and then phones people to say: “Congratulations! You get to see a doctor this month!”

But there is at least one area where Canada offers cutting-edge, life-saving technologies. Unfortunately, to get this care, you have to meow or bark. Veterinary care is still handled by the market. Providers innovate or go out of business.

Markets find ways to make things better and cheaper. Obamacare often forbids that. For example, it requires that every insurance policy cover preventive care and “breastfeeding support.” It insists that mammograms and colonoscopies be provided without any deductible.

It’s tempting to believe that such rules prevent illness and save money, but there is little evidence they will. Some people will undergo invasive procedures that shorten lives instead of extending them. Some of us want those tests; some don’t. Government-controlled medicine means we all get them and pay for them, regardless of whether we want them. Government control kills consumer choice.

Lucky Lasik and cosmetic surgery patients! Their treatments are better in part because government doesn’t consider them important enough to subsidize and regulate. If only government would neglect the rest of health care! Then we’d have better service and better care at lower cost.

And we’d have choices.

Here’s one more sad example:

Ben Chavis, founder and principal of the American Indian Public Charter Schools, got permission to compete with the Blob in Oakland, Calif. Chavis vowed, “We’ll outperform the other schools in five years.” He did. Kids at the three schools he runs now have some of the highest test scores in California.

His schools excel even though the government spends less on them.

But Chavis paid his wife to do accounting work, rented property to his schools and didn’t follow all of the Blob’s rules. So last month, the Oakland School Board said it might close the schools.

Parents and students begged the Blob – pardon me, the school board – not to. One sobbing mother pleaded with the board: “As soon as (my son) goes to this school, he’s a top student. … And now you guys want to take that away from me.” Many students implored, “Please don’t close down our school!”

The school board voted to close the schools anyway.

The students will now probably have to go to Oakland’s government-run schools, which are not as good. We asked members of the Oakland School Board to come on my TV show and discuss their decision, but they refused.

Chavis came on, though, and explained how working with his wife and renting space to the schools – regarded by the board as too incestuous – saved government money.

John Stossel’s logic is undeniable and refreshing — don’t miss his newest book, “No, They Can’t Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed”

“Yes. Some of the money did go to me,” he told me. “Someone had to step up and get space. We had 34 kids when I started. Today, we have 1,200.”

And those kids got a better education for less tax money. Who cares if Chavis kept some?

The Blob cares. The school board will get about $10 million back if they are no longer obliged to send pupils to Chavis’ schools.

They’ll be hard-pressed to beat Chavis’ academic results, though. U.S. News & World Report says his schools are No. 1 in Oakland. The Washington Post this month said American Indian is No. 1 on the list of most challenging high schools in America. Over the past three years, 100 percent of Chavis’ high school seniors were accepted to four-year colleges.

By contrast, in New York City, where I live, a third of high school students don’t even graduate in four years.

Chavis says that if the board thinks he stole money, they should arrest him instead of shutting down his schools.

“If I did steal anything … punish me. Don’t punish the students.”

And while options for kids in Oakland shrink, the Blob grows.

Over the past six decades, as the number of students in public schools doubled, the Friedman Foundation reports that the number of non-teaching staff got eight times as large. Non-teaching staff means assistant principals, associate principals, secretaries, social workers, etc. Twenty-one states now have more school administrators than teachers.

Despite all that new staff, test scores stayed flat.

At least there are a few signs of hope. Remember the union protests at the Wisconsin state Capitol two years ago? The union there eventually lost its fight to stop Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker from limiting collective bargaining. Now they can bargain over pay but little else. Contract negotiations that used to take years are sometimes resolved in 15 minutes.

Union membership is no longer automatic but has to be renewed annually by individual members, voluntarily. The result: Teachers unions lost about a third of their members.

I expected that but had no idea that some of the savings in Wisconsin would come from ending the union’s monopoly on health insurance. The union had demanded that its members buy insurance from a company the union created. Allowing other insurers to compete lowered insurance costs so much that Wisconsin has saved tens of millions of dollars.

Good for Scott Walker. Less money for the Blob means more money, and freedom, for the rest of us.

They buy commercials and tout their services the way private businesses do. They offer a service that customers want.

But a real business can’t get away with losing billions every year. (I guess in the era of bailouts, I should say shouldn’t get away with it.) The post office lost $16 billion last year, despite having all sorts of advantages most private businesses don’t have.

They have a near monopoly on first-class mail delivery. You want to deliver something to someone? You better not put it in their mailbox – that’s illegal. The U.S. Postal Service doesn’t pay sales tax or property tax. They don’t even pay parking tickets.

With advantages like that, how do they lose money?

They are part of the government, under the thumb of Congress, and that invites calcified, inefficient behavior.

“We are expected to operate like a business, but Congress has not allowed us the flexibility to operate like a business,” said Postal Service Board of Governors Chairman Mickey D. Barnett on my TV show. It’s all “part of being a quasi-governmental entity. That’s how the cookie crumbles.” Barnett added that the post office has “union contracts that have no layoff provisions.”

Reality is at odds with the proud claim on the post office’s website that “Since Ben Franklin … the Postal Service has grown and changed with America.” But it’s barely changed. You don’t tend to see change in “quasi-governmental entities.” You see stagnation.

John Stossel’s logic is undeniable and refreshing – don’t miss his newest book, “No, They Can’t Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed”

This year the post office tried to limit Saturday delivery to save money. But Congress forbade the change. The politicians’ constituents like getting their mail six days a week.

“They don’t want a cut in Saturday delivery,” Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., told me.

“The USPS does need reform,” Rep. Sam Graves, R-Mo., told the Kansas City Star. “However, reducing core services is not a long-term plan. I worry that reducing services will lead to other reductions like closing rural post offices.”

But the post office should do both. The government maintains hundreds of tiny local post offices, each of which brings in less than $700 a month. Running those offices costs much more than that. Some are just one mile away from other post offices.

People like “universal service,” which has been taken to mean that every American must get mail service, no matter how deep in the boondocks they live. The post office even hauls mail by mule to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

“The post office provides something that’s extremely valuable and has to be maintained, and that’s universal service,” Grayson told me. “There are countries a lot poorer than the United States, including the Congo … that try to provide universal mail service to everybody. … People don’t want post offices closed!”

On the floor of Congress, Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., proclaimed that universal service is required, saying, “It’s in the Constitution.”

But it’s not. The Constitution says, “Congress shall have the Power To … establish Post Offices.” But it doesn’t have to use that power.

Cato Institute budget analyst Tad DeHaven argues, “People living in rural America aren’t living there by force. … Go back to history. Private carriers picked up the mail from the post office and took it the last mile, or people came to the post office and picked it up.”

And private alternatives are much better today. We have email. UPS delivers 300 packages a minute and makes a profit. Federal Express, UPS and others thrive by finding new ways to cut costs. They don’t do it because they were born nicer people. They do it because of the pressure of competition. They make money – while the post office loses $16 billion.

Why not just privatize it? No more special government protections, no limit on competitors offering similar services.

Then mail service would be even better than before. The market delivers.

People often go into government to do that. But even when people mean well, it’s natural for them to help out their cronies.

David Stockman, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, was criticized for saying the government’s budget numbers didn’t add up. But he was right.

Now, in his book “The Great Deformation,” he says both major political parties failed ordinary Americans when the housing bubble burst and they rushed to bail out cronies at big banks. Government continues to threaten our future by printing gobs of money and guaranteeing trillions in loans to banks, homeowners, students and other politically connected groups.

The political class claims the economy would have been destroyed in 2008 without a bailout of the big banks. Stockman says that’s a myth: “The Main Street banks were not going to go into a huge retail bank run … and (Fed chairman Ben) Bernanke is totally wrong when he says we were on the verge of Depression 2.0. We weren’t close. We would have worked our way through it. We’ve done it many times in history.”

Worked our way through it? Without the bailouts, there might have been a bigger stock market drop, and more businesses would have closed! But Stockman says, so what? It would have been worth it. And I agree with him.

Today, taxpayers would be $1 trillion richer and not on the hook for trillions in loan guarantees. Prices would now have found a natural floor, business would be eagerly hiring again, and America would be free of moral hazards like “too big to fail” banks.

What do I mean by “moral hazard”? I once built a beach house on the edge of the ocean – a very risky place to build – but I did so because federal flood insurance guaranteed my investment. Eventually, a storm swept away my house, but I didn’t lose a penny. Government “insurance” covered my loss. Thanks, taxpayers!

Now that I’m wiser – and more libertarian – I’m ashamed that I took your money and understand that the whole program is a mistake. The same government that worries about global warming causing flooding spends billions to compensate risk-takers who live next to oceans. That’s moral hazard.

But beachfront property owners have political connections. They make desperate calls to legislators. Politicians respond to whoever screams loudest.

When the housing bubble burst, politicians got panicked calls from their friends on Wall Street – in many cases former colleagues. Instead of letting their old friends take big losses and trusting smaller banks to expand and take their customers, the political class propped up risk-takers who made bad bets.

It’s not that those who move back and forth between Wall Street and government are evil. But when you are close to a problem, you are quicker to panic. A few years back, brilliant scientists who studied SARS or bird flu sincerely thought a mass epidemic was coming, and therefore government had to “do something.” (It didn’t hurt that “doing something” meant spending more on their area of research.)

In 1999, computer techs really believed computers would freeze when the calendar turned to 2000, causing planes to fall from the sky. Killer-bee researchers were convinced bees would sting us to death. Anti-pesticide environmentalists, flesh-eating bacteria researchers and today’s global warming fanatics are all sincere in their fear.

But unlike Wall Street bankers, none could confiscate a trillion of your dollars and give them to their cronies. Believe me: If Al Gore could have done that, he would have.

Politicians accuse those of us who advocate limited government of being heartless when we say that government should not protect us against loss. But government efforts to “protect” us create a moral hazard that just makes our problems bigger over time.

Politicians say, “Yes, we can!” But don’t be fooled: “No, They Can’t.”

John Stossel’s logic is undeniable and refreshing – don’t miss his newest book, “No, They Can’t Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed”

I love trees and animals.

But you can love nature and still hate the tyranny that environmental regulations bring.

The Environmental Protection Agency just announced it will boost gas prices (“only” a penny, although industry says 6 to 9 cents) to make another minuscule improvement to air quality.

In New York City, my mayor wants to ban Styrofoam cups, saying, “I think it’s something we can do without.”

Congress already dictates the design of our cars, toilets and light bulbs.

Originally, environmental rules were a good thing. I love the free market, but it doesn’t offer a practical remedy to pollution. I could sue polluters for violating my property rights, but under our legal system, that’s not even close to practical.

So in the ’70s, government passed rules that demanded we stop polluting the air and water. Industry put scrubbers in smokestacks. Towns installed sewage treatment. Now the air is quite clean, and I can swim in the rivers around Manhattan.

But government didn’t stop there. Government never stops. Now that the air is cleaner, government spends even more than it spent to clean the air to subsidize feeble methods of energy production, like windmills and solar panels. Activists want even more spending. A few years back, the Center for American Progress announced they were upset that “Germany, Spain and China Are Seizing the Energy Opportunity … the United States Risks Getting Left Behind.”

In this case, we’re better off “left behind.” After spending billions, those European governments made no breakthroughs, and now they’re cutting back.

The Endangered Species Act was another noble idea. We all want to save polar bears. But now the bureaucrats make it almost impossible for some people to improve their own property.

John Stossel’s logic is undeniable and refreshing — don’t miss his newest book, “No, They Can’t Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed”

Louisiana landowner Edward Poitevent wants to build homes and offices north of Lake Pontchartrain. He could provide safe high-ground housing to people eager to move away from areas that were flooded during Hurricane Katrina. But he is not allowed to build because the government decided 1,500 acres of his land should become a preservation area for a threatened species called the dusky gopher frog. None of these frogs currently live on his property. On my TV show, Poitevent said, “The Fish and Wildlife Service has certified that the frog has not been seen in the state of Louisiana since 1967.”

Fish and Wildlife Service officials said they were “not available” to come on the show to talk about this. Instead, they posted a video on YouTube that says they work “with” landowners: “The Service has many voluntary partnership-based programs that can provide technical and financial assistance to manage species.”

That sounds nice, but the government’s handbook on how to work with them is an onerous 315 pages long.

The environmentalists so torment those who resist their schemes that some landowners tell each other, “If you find an endangered species, shoot, shovel and shut up!” That’s mostly a joke. But it does happen, and it’s one more way government regulations backfire.

Throughout the world, most reductions in pollution have been achieved because of capitalism, not government control.

Fracking for natural gas reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

Even much-hated coal and oil provide benefits. Science writer Matt Ridley says, “Burning of fossil fuels is helping the rainforest in the Amazon to grow.”

Ridley also points out modern industrial farming allows people to grow more food on less land, so people cut down fewer trees. “New England used to be 70 percent farmland – it’s now 70 percent forest.”

You can even see the difference between areas that get greener and ones that don’t from space: The Dominican Republic is noticeably greener than its immediate neighbor, Haiti, mainly because the Dominican Republic uses fossil fuel instead of burning wood from its forests for fuel, as Haiti does.

Industry and technology, not regulations, are humanity’s greatest contribution to the environment. Leave people their freedom, and they come up with new, smarter, more efficient and thus cleaner ways of doing things. Stifling that process with regulation isn’t “progressive.”

It’s like they live in a private bubble.

Politicians say, “I’m going to Washington to serve others.” Maybe they mean to. But after most “serve,” they never leave. When I visit Washington, I see politicians and bureaucrats serving themselves.

When the housing bubble burst, home prices dropped in most of America, but not in Washington. Our capital feeds off federal spending, and politicians won’t allow that bubble to burst.

One result is that, today, for the first time, most of America’s richest counties are in the Washington area. Of the richest 1 percent of counties in the U.S., 43 percent surround the nation’s capital city.

Nick Sorrentino, creator of AgainstCronyCapitalism.org, notes that average total compensation for a federal employee is now about $120,000, and the gap between government pay and private pay has been growing.

It’s not that Washingtonians are smarter or more productive than the rest of us. It’s that as government grows, more money flows to lobbyists, trade groups and others who live close to those who pass out your money. Government is a parasite – but a parasite that helps its friends. The way people get rich in Washington is not by inventing things, but by being good at schmoozing and manipulating the bureaucrats who control your money.

Tourists visit Washington and admire the beautiful buildings. All that marble once made me feel patriotic, too, but now I get angry.

Unions claim workers are “under”-paid. But today’s union headquarters resemble palaces. The biggest teachers union, the National Education Association, built a $100 million Washington headquarters that it calls “an environmental oasis.” The AFL-CIO’s beautiful lobby features a giant mosaic made of marble, glass and gold. When I tried to take pictures, so TV viewers could see the elegance, I was told to leave.

Government buildings are grand, too, even new ones like the Reagan office building. “It’s very much like Versailles before the French Revolution,” says historian John Steele Gordon.

Washingtonians have become like the French nobility, who spent their lives in the palace at Versailles “and didn’t know much about what went on outside that world.”

“But the real royalty is not in Washington, D.C.,” Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., tells me. “It’s on Wall Street.”

It’s true that there’s more wealth on Wall Street, but Gordon points out that there’s a big difference between those fat cats and Washingtonians. “In the private sector, if you find a way to cut costs, you’re a hero. If you find a way to cut costs in the (government) bureaucracy, you’re a goat.”

You’re a “goat” because cutting waste hurts the lobbyists who feed off taxpayers. With trillions of dollars at stake, corporations and special interests would be crazy not to lobby. Lobbyists and taxpayer-funded special privilege won’t go away unless big government does.

We could improve America’s future just by recognizing what so-called “public choice” economists started to realize around the time of World War II: that government isn’t just a “public servant.” It’s not a demon, either. But government and its employees are selfish, like anyone else. That explains most of their behavior better than occasional shifts to the political left or right.

We all tend to overspend and act lazy when we can get away with it. In the private sector, though, that eventually means that you get fired or realize you’re depleting your bank account. In Washington, the Fed just prints more money.

As long as Washington spends other people’s money, there will be little incentive for it to be prudent – or humble.

John Stossel’s logic is undeniable and refreshing — don’t miss his newest book, “No, They Can’t Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed”

The union is a big reason kids don’t like school and learn less. Union contracts limit flexibility, limit promotion of good teachers, waste money and make it hard for principals to fire even terrible teachers.

But I was wrong to imply that the union is the biggest problem. In states with weak unions, K-12 schools stagnate, too.

Education reformers have a name for the resistance: the education “Blob.” The Blob includes the teachers unions, but also janitors and principals unions, school boards, PTA bureaucrats, local politicians and so on.

They hold power because the government’s monopoly on K-12 education eliminates most competition. Kids are assigned to schools, and a bureaucracy decides who goes where and who learns what. Over time, its tentacles expand and strangle attempts to reform. Since they have no fear of losing their jobs to competitors, monopoly bureaucrats can resist innovation for decades.

As one advocate of competition put it, the Blob says: “We don’t do that here. We have to requisition downtown. We got to get four or five people to sign off; the deputy director of curriculum has to say this is OK, etc.” Most reformers just give up.

The Blob insists the schools need more money, but that’s a myth. America tripled spending per student since I was in college, without improving student achievement.

In Los Angeles, they spent half a billion dollars to build the most expensive school in America. They planted palm trees, put in a swimming pool and spent thousands of new dollars per student.

John Stossel’s logic is undeniable and refreshing – don’t miss his newest book, “No, They Can’t Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed”

The school is beautiful, but how’s the education? Not so good. The school graduates just 56 percent of its students.

Three schools in Oakland that Ben Chavis started aren’t as fancy, but the students do better. They get top test scores. And Chavis doesn’t just take the most promising or richest students, as teachers unions often claim competitive schools do. Chavis’ schools take kids from the poorest neighborhoods.

So what does the education Blob decide to do? Shut his schools down.

School board members don’t like Chavis. I understand why. He’s obnoxious. Arrogant. He probably broke some rules. For example, he’s accused of making a profit running his schools. Horrors! A profit!

If he did profit, I say, so what? He still got top test results with less government money. Good for him!

But the Blob doesn’t like success that’s outside its monopoly. It doesn’t matter that Chavis has now resigned from the school’s board. Oakland may still close his schools. Think about that. As measured by student achievement, his schools are the best. But the Blob doesn’t care. And the Blob has the power of government behind it.

In New York City, the union teachers protesting outside my office said: “Our rules are good and necessary, and if cities would let us train teachers and run schools, we’d do a great job. … We have the expertise, intelligence, the experience to do what works for children.”

They said if charter schools must exist, the union should run one, and they “would create a school where all parents would want to send their children.” So New York City gave the United Federation of Teachers a charter school of its own. The union boss called it an “oasis.”

But what happened? Today, the teachers union school is one of New York’s worst. It got a “D” on its city report card. Only a third of its students read at grade level. And the school still lost a million dollars.

Yet it’s the union’s model school! I assume they tried their best, staffed it with some of their best teachers. The union knew we were watching. But with union rules and the Blob’s bureaucracy, they failed miserably.

I really want to ask them why they hate competition, but they won’t come on my show.