[media-credit name=’BEN CLASSON/Herald photo’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′][/media-credit]"20/20" co-anchor John Stossel spoke to University of Wisconsin students Monday evening at the Memorial Union Theatre encouraging individual liberty and capitalism in a lecture presented by Collegians For a Constructive Tomorrow.

Stossel graduated from Princeton University in 1969 and joined the ABC news program in 1981. He became an anchor in 2003 and has received 19 Emmy Awards.

Stossel focused his lecture on the dangers of government and the importance of protecting individual rights.

"Individual liberty is the most important thing," Stossel said in an interview with The Badger Herald before the event. "Central planning of all kinds takes people's freedom and their money and makes life worse."

Stossel began his lecture by discussing the lessons he has learned through his experiences in journalism.

"I used to believe that you need smart people to set rules to protect us from greedy capitalists," Stossel said.

After he spent years doing consumer reporting, however, he said he realized that "competition between companies protects consumers better than the government."

Stossel said no matter how many regulations the government has made in the past, there have always been those who break the rules.

"More regulations and rules were being made, but they still weren't being followed," Stossel said. "The cheaters are still going to cheat."

Stossel said after watching government organizations such as the Food and Drug Administration and Occupation Safety and Health Administration work, he has come to realize they often make work less safe by their unintended consequences.

Stossel used the example of illegal drugs to show how regulation doesn't always accomplish what it intends to.

"Because the drugs are illegal, the buyers have to steal, and this causes crime," Stossel said.

Illegal drugs also encourage police bribing and rich criminal gangs, according to Stossel.

He said government regulation also hurts legal drugs. In the time it takes for new drugs to be put out on the market, lives could have been saved, Stossel said.

"The government protects us from good things, which is worse than protecting us from bad things," Stossel said.

Stossel suggested the FDA be voluntary and people should decide for themselves what they want to put in their own bodies.

"Isn't leaving absolute choice up to the consumer what America is all about?" Stossel asked the audience.

UW junior Sol Grosskopf, who attended the lecture, said he agreed with most of Stossel's points about small government but added the host may have gone a bit beyond his own views in some areas.

"On a few things he may have gone a little bit overboard but we may differ more on societal values and how they are portrayed," Grosskopf said.

Overall, though, Stossel said Americans are voluntarily giving back their freedom to the government.

"I encourage you to fight for the liberty that made America great and all things possible," Stossel said.

— Nick Penzenstadler contributed to this report.