The Bob Zadek Show

We take it for granted that water comes out when we turn on our faucets and garden hoses – even in the drought-stricken west. Yet the way some doomsayers talk about the issue, it seems like one day we might wake up to a dry spigot. Such an outcome is unlikely, however, because of the nature of scarcity: when something becomes more precious, people find ways to conserve it. Prices rise to incentivize less use, and greater production.

Robert Glennon is one of the nation's preeminent experts on water policy and law, and the author of Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It. He points to a fatal flaw in the allocation of water, particularly in the western states where resources are more limited: when the majority of water rights were assigned, several decades ago, they were based on incorrect assumptions about the supply. Today, there are more rights to water than there is water.

Glennon believes that the fix is multifaceted, and includes a mix of political and market solutions. He joined me to discuss how property rights can be clarified, and new markets created to allow for more efficient distribution of one of our most precious resources: freshwater.

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Can market pricing solve the drought?

Caroline Fredrickson is Distinguished Visitor from Practice at Georgetown Law Center, Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and author of The Democracy Fix, Under the Bus, and The AOC Way: The Secrets of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Success.

She joined me or part II of my series on the National Constitution Center's brilliant experiment, soliciting three revisions to the Constitution: one libertarian, one conservative and one progressive.

Can you guess which team Caroline will be representing?

Find out what "Team Progressive" prioritized in their rewriting of our founding document, and how the balance of power would shift among the branches of government.

If you missed my show with Timothy Sandefur, you can listen to the podcast or read the transcript to get up to speed on the libertarian perspective. I've decided to interview a representative from each team, and am delighted to welcome Caroline to the show of ideas.

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Caroline Fredrickson on the Progressive Constitution

How does one attempt to see the unseen? The question may seem more like a Zen koan than vital concern of economists. The idea of tracing hidden consequences of different policies, however, must be discovered anew with every generation of policymaker and economic adviser.

Frederic Bastiat is credited with the original framing of the "seen" vs the "unseen," using the parable a broken window to expose the common fallacy that destruction begets economic growth. Later, Henry Hazlitt would demolish the recycled Keynesian ideas in his time, arguing that government can stimulate "aggregate demand" by spending tax dollars on make-work projects like digging holes. In both cases, the resources used to stimulate spending come out of the pockets of people who would have otherwise spent the money more productively.

This year, Ryan Bourne continues the noble tradition of Bastiat and Hazlitt in his new book Economics in One Virus – a clever spin on Hazlitt's famous "Economics in One Lesson." What can COVID teach us about the pitfalls of government intervention? Bourne lays out the high costs and murky benefits of policies such as lockdowns and mandatory masking, when voluntary alternatives would likely had achieved the same if not better results in terms of mitigating spread, without the devastating effects on small business.

Almost two years into "two weeks to slow the spread," we will revisit the problem of the pandemic from an economic standpoint. Bourne reminds us that economics is not all about dollars and cents – it's the stuff of our daily lives, including the trade-offs that determine our fundamental well-being. To ignore costs simply because they cannot be measured, such as the relationships weakened or business lost, is to commit the oldest economic fallacy in the book.

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Ryan Bourne on the Economic Fallacies of the Pandemic Policymakers

Here's a thought experiment: If the Constitution were re-written according to modern libertarian standards, how would it be different? The idea of a "libertarian Constitution" may seem redundant – the Founders were forerunners of the classical liberals, who in turn paved the way for the libertarian movement.

The National Constitution Center, however, recently posed this challenge to a group of libertarian legal scholars, along with two other groups of scholars: one progressive, and one conservative.

Timothy Sandefur, along with his Cato colleague Ilya Shapiro and Brooklyn Law School professor Christina Mulligan, drafted their version of the Constitution to include additional protections of individual liberties (unsurprisingly). In hindsight, we can see that the founders were insufficiently wary of executive authority – except for perhaps George Mason. They left the door open for the erosion of the separation of powers, especially by the administrative state – something corrected in the proposed Libertarian Constitution. Furthermore, Sandefur et al.'s "Ellis Island Clause" would restore immigration to early 20th-century policies, and limit arbitrary federal restrictions on who can move to the United States.

I spent the hour with Sandefur – the Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation – expanding my sense of possibility, and exploring what we can learn from various state constitutions in working towards a more perfect union.

Be sure to follow Timothy on Twitter: @TimothySandefur and subscribe to the Goldwater Institute's newsletter.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bobzadek.com/subscribe

Halloween happens to fall on a Sunday this year, which means my guest this weekend will have to weave the topic in with the spooky holiday. Chris Edwards, my go-to expert at Cato on all things debt and tax-related, should have no trouble frightening my listeners with his latest analysis.

Where to start? The skyrocketing debt has economists murmuring about inflation. But sometimes the proposed solutions are even more terrifying than the problem itself – as in the case of new taxes on capital gains, corporate income, and even a special so-called "billionaire's tax" on unrealized capital gains. Edwards returns to the show to break down the folly of scapegoating the wealthy, and why this approach is likely to backfire.

All the while, tax revenues have actually grown to their highest rates. Yet rather than using the windfall to reduce debt, Democrats are proposing a new spending binge that makes the 2008 stimulus look like chump change. As always, the government promises that its spending spree will stimulate innovation and growth, but Edwards points to the well-established link between debt and reduced growth.

They say that death and taxes are the two inevitabilities. Massive debt, however, is not inevitable.

Tune in for a special Halloween edition of The Bob Zadek Show to hear how we can turn back the debt clock, or at least stop the ticking time bomb that it represents.

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Chris Edwards on debt and taxes

In recent memory, Democrats have been considered the pro-immigration party in the United States. In California, the Republican's shameful trumpeting of Proposition 187, which scapegoated undocumented immigrants, has turned the state solid Blue after alienating an otherwise moderate Hispanic population. Yet both parties have been guilty of using the issue of immigration as a political football to score points and claim the moral high ground against the other – all while the very real humanitarian crisis at the border has gotten worse and worse.

I have frequently lamented the terrible treatment by Republicans of immigrants, in whom conservatives and libertarians should see a natural ally. Immigrants are the ultimate entrepreneurs – risking it all for a better life. They commit less crime than native populations. And above all, they work hard.

Daniel Di Martino – a young economist and Young Voices contributor originally from Venezuela –has made a forceful case for the GOP to become a pro-immigration party. While he was fortunate enough to obtain a scholarship that allowed him to come study in the United States in 2016, most Venezuelans have had nowhere to go. Di Martino notes how the Biden Administration's bumbling bureaucracy has slowed the processing of visa applications to below even Trump era levels. He joined me to offer an alternative to the partisan bickering that has done nothing to alleviate the plight of immigrants.

Can a more immigrant-friendly GOP break the Democratic monopoly on the immigrant vote, and turn the tide of socialism? Find out on the show of ideas, not attitude.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bobzadek.com/subscribe