John Stossel Credits Ayn Rand

The Atlas Society reports that the Daily Princetonian ? the Princeton University student newspaper ? carries an interview with John Stossel, the famous investigative reporter for ABC News. From the inteview:

When I struggling with these ideas, I was reading the liberal press, which was in love with the welfare state, and it didn’t really make sense to me. And the conservative press seemed to want to bring police into our bedrooms.
Then I discovered something called Reason Magazine, based out of Los Angeles, which just made sense. Suddenly there were these people who grappled with these ideas before me who understood them better than I did and had a real intellectual foundation for it. My favorite writer there was the editor ? a woman named Virginia Postrel ? who I assumed was some 60 year old lady writing brilliant stuff. But she turned out to be about 10 years behind me at Princeton … Ayn Rand and a book by Charles Murray called In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government have also influenced me.

Stossel?s hard-hitting TV specials and reports on the show ?20/20? are grounded explicitly in a libertarian philosophy. And among those whom he acknowledges in his new bestseller, Give Me a Break, is The Objectivist Center Executive Director David Kelley.