The Bob Zadek Show

Unfortunately for his readers, the Q2 GDP figure, which sticks out like a sore “thumbs down," paints a very misleading picture. Jeremy Horpedahl takes less than 1,000 words or so to dispel the 32.9% decline figure – making necessary adjustments to come to the number of -9.5%.

While rumors of economic destruction have been greatly exaggerated, the real story still isn’t pretty. Ryan Young of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is unsatisfied with the policy response to a novel recession caused by our response to a novel virus. At the federal level, politicians have had remarkably little creativity. They keep recycling “stimulus” funding that rewards people for not working, while punishing those who are trying to work with burdensome regulation.

You know him as “@RegoftheDay” on Twitter – Young is the anti-regulation warrior the world needs now more than ever. He joins me this Sunday to discuss CEI’s new #NeverNeeded campaign – highlighting laws that COVID revealed to be particularly unnecessary or even harmful, but which we never needed in the first place. In a recent article for National Review, Young writes:

“Unfortunately, many drastic regulations are passed during emergencies, from unconstitutional national-security and surveillance policies to bailouts for favored big businesses. But fortunately, regulations can also be removed that way. We have a choice. The famous “ratchet effect” of government’s grabbing power during a crisis and keeping it afterward does not have to be an iron law.”

My new book on “Essential Liberty” (download a sample) makes the same point as Ryan – that we have a golden opportunity to usher in the Libertarian moment we’ve been waiting for.

Where to start? How about the tariffs that cost the average American family $2,000/year? Or the occupational licensing laws that are stopping people from working in their chosen profession?

Trump has ordered every federal agency to eliminate nonessential regulations that might be hindering the economic recovery. With over 1 million Federal regulations totaling 185,000 pages on the books, it shouldn’t be hard to cut red tape by at least as much as the alleged decline in Q2 GDP.

Glenn Roper of the Pacific Legal Foundation reviews the legal challenges to
unconstitutional lockdowns in the states.

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The unelected bureaucracy known as the administrative state is usually associated with Federal government. However, the states also have their own home-grown administrative states, including the state and county health departments that have been responsible for determining what counts as “essential business” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As Clint Bolick pointed out in Grassroots Tyranny, we must be just as vigilant when defending our rights against local government as when guarding against Leviathan.

Glenn Roper is an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, who has been closely following the latest developments at the state and local level. He argues in a recent article that emergency powers such as those being exercised by governors violate the separation of powers written into state constitutions. In Wisconsin, for example, health officials were delegated the authority to make the rules on business re-openings – rules which, if violated, implied criminal penalties including arrest. PLF is keeping tabs on where such rules have been enacted, and defending citizens from unconstitutional closures of their businesses.

This Sunday, I will host Roper for the full hour on why a crisis like COVID makes it more important – not less – to enforce a strict separation of powers. If the government is going to take away our rights due to extraordinary circumstances, they must go through the elected legislature. The courts have intervened in Wisconsin, dealing a blow to the “mini-administrative state” there, but elsewhere such as Michigan, the citizens still need help.

Tune in live, and support the PLF in their important mission to protect the individual rights of Americans during the COVID-19 crisis.

Portland is turning into the test-case for federal incursions on states’
responsibilities.

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What’s going on in America’s cities?

The Trump administration says that gangs and violent anarchists are out of control, and that governors and mayors aren’t doing enough to stop them. Accordingly, they’re sending in the feds, and we are witnessing Robert Higgs’s “Ratchet Effect” in real time. Federal Government is using the latest crisis to justify new incursions on our liberties.

Patrick Eddington, a research fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute, says that the recent DHS action in Portland is an experiment on unwitting human test subjects. The preliminary results seem to have emboldened the administrative state to push forward with “Operation Legend” – an aggressive federal law enforcement action in cities across the country. President Trump says that an alphabet soup of agencies - led by the DOJ - has “no choice but to get involved.”

“The FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service and Homeland Security will together be sending hundreds of skilled law enforcement officers to Chicago to help drive down violent crime,” said Trump on Wednesday, before Attorney General William Barr took to the podium to justify his deployment of anti-gang task forces engaged in everything from a ramped-up War on Drugs to counter-protests against Black Lives Matter and related groups.

Eddington positions this rhetoric squarely within the “American authoritarian tradition” – running through the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, Lincoln’s suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War, Wilson’s Espionage Act, FDR’s Japanese internment, the HUAC… the list goes on.

Most disturbingly, we have seen the past two administrations suspend the Posse Comitatus Act - the 1878 Law preventing government from using soldiers to enforce ordinary law - in progressive increments. First, President Bush’s 2002 Homeland Security Act allowed the DHS to deploy federal agents to protect federal buildings. Next, Obama’s 2012 authorization of the National Defense Authorization Act redefined U.S. territory as a battlefield and legalized indefinite detainment of American citizens without access to a trial or attorney.

We now have DHS officials in military uniform taking American citizens into unmarked vans by without clear probable cause.

Leftist mayors and governors who now complain about the use of unconstitutional force against protestors in Portland were silent during the Obama years. Are the chickens coming home to roost?

Regardless, libertarians must be vigilant in standing against unconstitutional violations of due process and the separation of powers.

Terry Pell of the Center for Individual Rights and his plaintiff Jeffrey
Barke on California’s unconstitutional Section 3550

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Cato Vice President John Samples on his role on the Facebook Oversight
Board.

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We are witnessing yet another purge on major social media networks from Twitter to YouTube. Conservative and libertarian voices are among those being banned or suspended for vague violations of the terms of service, including Stefan Molyneux, whose 15-year old channel was flagged for promoting “hate speech.”

Meanwhile, the general climate of free speech and expression is perhaps at an all time low, with cancel culture accelerating to the point that we might question how much longer our 1st Amendment protections will be worth anything.

However, I’ve taken a stand against the government regulation of social media, despite the de-platforming of voices that are quote-unquote “on our side.” The reason has to do with these companies’ status as private actors, who themselves have speech rights. To force them to publish content against their will - no matter how mild or offensive - cuts against the Framers’ vision of the 1st Amendment.

John Samples, Vice President of the Cato Institute, is part of a solution that I can get behind. As a member of the Oversight Board, he is among a diverse group of academics that will hold Facebook accountable for its policies to maximize freedom of expression without allowing its users to post harmful content. Admittedly, this is a fine line, but the power always resides in the end with users who are free to exit the platform for “freer” alternatives.

As we’ve seen with this past week’s exodus of conservatives from Twitter to the knock-off app Parler, the problem of content moderation runs much deeper than the ideological leanings of its founders. Parler quickly earned a reputation for being trigger-happy with bans, despite its claim to allow any speech that would be allowed “on the streets of New York City.” Those targeted appear to be people who dared to question that app’s less than transparent terms of service.

Twitter proves that whoever invents and sustains lively discussion on the online equivalent of the public square can get rich. This explains why the big companies are now outsourcing the role of moderation to credible outsiders like the Oversight Board, and have a vested interest in solving the problem.

This Sunday, Samples joined me for the full hour to discuss the process the Oversight Board will use to balance concerns about free speech against the need to prevent certain forms of speech which have never been protected (i.e., inciting violence).

The market of ideas is alive and well on the show of #ideanotattitude.

Award-winning freelance writer Kim Kavin writes in Reason Magazine how new
worker protection laws hurt those they’re supposed to help.

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Millions of Americans have discovered that working as an independent contractor offers them freedom and flexibility. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo would have you believe that they are all victims of unfair labor practices – akin to the seamstresses who tragically perished in the over-crowded Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911.

“As FDR, Al Smith, and Frances Perkins protected workers after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, we too must protect workers from today's threat, which is economic exploitation." – Andrew Cuomo

Never mind that 80% of independent contractors say they prefer the more flexible arrangement to being salaried employees – with all of the restrictions and burdens that come with the benefits. State legislatures across the country, following California’s lead, are introducing legislation in an attempt to force companies like Uber to reclassify their drivers from independent contractors to employees. So far, the primary result in California has been Uber and others fighting back in court, while once-thriving independent contractors lose income in more than 300 types of careers identified so far.

California was the first state to pass its version of this kind of misguided worker “protection” – AB 5. The bill was signed last year by Governor Newsom and went into effect on January 1. Kim Kavin, a freelance writer and co-founder of Fight for Freelancers New Jersey, has a feature in the latest edition of Reason [I Don’t Want To Be Anybody’s Employee] showing how these laws – now proliferating in other states including New York and New Jersey – are harming the people they are intended to help. Instead of converting contractors to employees, thousands of contractors lost work.

Facing the prospect of unemployment, freelancers are fighting back, alongside minority small-business owners who are disproportionately hurt by the onerous new hiring requirements. “AB5 has already crushed thousands of Black businesses and will keep more form operating in the gig economy,” said California Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, echoing a statement issued by the California Black Chamber of Commerce.

Kim joins the show this Sunday to talk about the failure of legislators and their enablers in media to confront the full range of unintended consequences. It’s not just higher Uber fees, as the NY Times editorial board claims.

We discuss Joe Biden’s recent endorsement of bills like AB 5, and why a federal version would be tragic for the most vulnerable workers.

Tune in to learn how we can stop the law before it devastates the gig economy – one of the last remaining pockets of the free market – only on the show of #ideasnotattitude.