The Bob Zadek Show

Scott Horton on the War in Afghanistan

The American taxpayer has long accepted that education is a public good – something worthy of funding with the common purse. Until recently, a majority of Americans, including parents, have also believed that public schools are a generally the right vehicle for that funding. However, opinion has changed rapidly, and the response by school administrators to COVID-19 has accelerated the pace of that change. A new survey finds that more than 80% of parents believe that taxpayer funds should follow students to whatever schools they attend, rather than defaulting to the defective public school system.

Even more tellingly, Matt Welch reports that "Families are Fleeing Government Run Schools" – voting with their kids' feet, as it were, against the sudden and unpredictable closures and suspensions of in-person learning. Welch, an editor at large at Reason Magazine, has been reporting on the shift taking place among the population – with an increasing number of both upper and lower-class progressives suddenly embracing school choice when the dysfunction of government-run schools became too glaring to ignore. He joined me to explain why parents are taking their kids out of public schools, and where they are all going.

Have the teachers' unions overplayed their hand in demanding indefinite virtual learning and protections for their members at the expense of learning outcomes for children?

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Parents Voting With Their Kids' Feet

“There is a Passion natural to the Mind of man, especially a free Man, which renders him impatient of Restraint.” ― George Mason

George Mason is rolling in his grave. Or at least, he was, until Professor Todd Zywicki was finally exempted from George Mason University's new mandatory vaccination policy. Zywicki, a professor at the Antonin Scalia School of Law and frequent guest on the show of ideas, is no Anti-Vaxxer; he is, however, an ardent believer in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. These documents, if they are not to be considered artifacts, guarantee all Americans the right to privacy and the freedom from substantial interference with one's bodily autonomy without due process.

Zywicki was one of millions of Americans who already had the virus, and thus acquired the natural immunity that the vaccine is meant to mimic. That wasn't considered a good enough reason for GMU to exempt him, even though natural infection has been shown to create longer-lasting immunity. Faced with the threat of termination, Zywicki stood his ground – penning a WSJ article to make his case in the court of public opinion. He argued that those with prior infection were at a higher risk of adverse reaction, for a vaccine that would provide no proven additional benefits. Backed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, and his attorney Jenin Younes, he then filed briefs to challenge the constitutionality of the workplace policy, which is becoming increasingly common across the country. Since then, the George Mason University administration backed down, but the legal questions are far from settled.

I was joined by Todd and his lawyer, Jenin to review the case that would have been argued – both on the grounds of the latest science around natural immunity, as well as the constitutional considerations around privacy and bodily autonomy. We may not know what George Mason would have thought about the studies showing the relative risks and benefits of vaccination for the naturally immune, but I'd be willing to bet that the founder who insisted on a Bill of Rights before ratifying the Constitution would have opposed his namesake's draconian mandate.

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Jenin Younes & Todd Zywicki join me to discuss the constitutionality of

blanket vaccine mandates.

The sudden but not entirely unpredictable collapse of the American-trained forces in Afghanistan has woken much of the country up to the futility of our "forever wars" in the Middle East. Beyond the waste of a trillion dollars and countless lives over twenty years (for what?), we are now left with yet another humanitarian refugee crisis. Many European countries seem to have had their fill of refugees, and the Biden administration has yet to follow through on its promises to expedite asylum for the most desperate Afghans, who are now facing brutal persecution at the hands of the Taliban.

Most people agree that those who assisted the U.S. effort and thus find a target on their heads should be given priority for asylum status. But what about those who are seeking asylum from forced labor under terrorist groups like the Taliban or, in other countries, ISIS? In a recent USA Today article, GMU legal scholar Ilya Somin directs our attention to a bizarrely cruel ruling by the Department of Justice’s Board of Immigration Appeals in 2018 classifies such slave laborers as ineligible for asylum because their forced labor qualifies as "material support" for terrorism.

Somin joined me to explain how such legal gymnastics were ever justified in the first place, and what the current Attorney General can do about it. We also considered the arguments for and against letting in larger numbers of refugees from Afghanistan and other countries.

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Hard Questions About Asylum and Afghanistan

2020 was a bad year for small business. Government waged war on the entrepreneur in the name of public safety – imposing harsh lockdowns on those deemed "unessential." Carol Roth, author of a new book "The War on Small Business: How the Government Used the Pandemic to Crush Small Business," makes an important observation that large corporations tended to be exempt from the lockdowns. Isn't that funny!

Roth is a content creator, “recovering” investment banker, entrepreneur, TV pundit and host, and New York Times bestselling author. With 300+ pages of evidence, her new books makes the case that the government has been treating the little guy unfairly since long before COVID. However, the pandemic provided a perfect excuse to ramp up its preferential treatment of privileged cronies at corporations.

Can we even call this capitalism anymore?

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Carol Roth on the War on Small Business

A Gallup study collecting polls over the last 13 years estimates that 17 to 23% of Americans identify as libertarian. One-fifth of the population is not bad, but even that never seems to translate into meaningful progress at the ballot box. Furthermore, the idea of a "libertarian politician" still seems like an oxymoron.

Marc J. Victor is an attorney who has fought for his clients' freedoms for decades, and is now turning his attention to a broader goal of building a global peace movement under the mantra of "Live and Let Live." His ideas are fundamentally libertarian, but the Live and Let Live Movement differs from the Libertarian Party in several key ways.

First, it is global—not national.

Second, it presents libertarian ideas in a way that should be agreeable to any reasonable person of principles. Rather than focusing on the arcane details of why the non-aggression principle passes moral and philosophical muster, Victor would prefer to let the principle speak for itself: just don't hurt people, and don't take their stuff. It's what we all learned in Kindergarten, although the majority of people could use a friendly reminder.

What better substitute for the often-confusing "NAP" (non-aggression principle) than the "3LP" – the Live and Let Live Principle? Victor joined the show to talk about this urgently needed rebranding of liberty, and how the ideas of Live and Let Live are taking hold in small communities across the world.

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