The Bob Zadek Show

Joan Blades was an entrepreneur co-founder of MoveOn.org.

John Gable (also a tech entrepreneur) was a Republican operative — helping elect politicians like Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell.

Joan and John are the unlikely duo behind a viral TED talk on the problem of political polarization, and the founders of a technology-based solution.

AllSides.com is your one-stop shop for headlines from across the political spectrum. Like a bulldozer for bias, All Sides conveniently aggregates stories from around the web along with a rating — left, right, center, or left- or right-leaning.

Screenshot of AllSides.com. Try switching your morning news source from Drudge Report or Huffington Post to AllSides.com and see what it does to your blood pressure.

I’ll admit — it’s fun to get mad at the idiocy of the “other side” and the internet offers an endless supply of confirmation bias for whatever opinions you hold.

But the danger of such extreme political polarization is that our government may not function the way it’s supposed to.

In my book Power to the States: How Federalism 2.0 Can Make America Governable Again, I theorized that anger in politics is a result of too much power being given to Federal government.

John and Joan, however, see something else — namely, that the advent of digital communities allows us to select our news sources to fit our narrow beliefs (rather than forming our beliefs from the same set of facts).

John and Joan joined me to discuss the nature of these “filter bubbles” — our self-made echo chambers — and how their platform works to “pop” these bubbles of bias.

Be sure to catch the full conversation.

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

A conservative Hollywood screenwriter’s latest novel takes on the

narcissism of our age in a hilarious Faustian remake.

Don Boudreaux on the War on Trade

In a rare point of agreement, both the New York Times Editorial Board and the Libertarian Party are criticizing Trump’s tariffs.

“Tariffs are Taxes that Americans Pay” reads the LP’s new bumper sticker slogan.

“Trump’s Tariffs Are a New Tax on Americans” say the NYT editorial board.

Put simply, a tariff is just a tax on imports. There’s no getting around the cost to Americans, leading free market economists to observe that imposing tariffs is like poking ourselves in the eye to punish our trading partners.

But it goes beyond this. Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary unintentionally made the point about the destructive nature of trade wars during an interview with Nick Gillespie for Reason TV:

It’s not an understatement when Don Boudreaux calls the trade war a “War on Trade.” O’Leary calls it a “brilliant” move by Trump to pressure Canada to arrest a powerful Chinese national’s daughter in Canada to poison relations between the two countries.

It was intended, O’Leary suspects, to prevent China from shifting its imports of raw materials from the U.S. to Canada, and it worked.

China did halt imports from Canada, but it also retaliated by threatening to KILL two Canadian prisoners.

Treachery breeds treachery. This won’t end well.

What’s Wrong with Trumponomics?
According to economists like Steve Moore, however, Trump’s tariffs could effectively pressure countries like China to stop manipulating their currency. The long-term devaluation of the Yuan has helped spur the domestic economy — especially manufacturing — in China, and some credit the policy with China’s overall growth and low unemployment (and simultaneous loss of manufacturing output in the U.S.).

Listening to Moore, one can easily get the impression that we are merely experiencing a bump in the road en route to globally free trade.

Not everyone is buying it, though.

Boudreaux — a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center, GMU economics professor, and curator of the eminently readable Cafe Hayek—doesn’t accept the argument that Trump’s trade war will lead to “zero-zero” tariffs in the long run.

Why not? First, because Trump doesn’t indicate any understanding of free trade.

Trump exalts “jobs” above the broader metric of prosperity. Boudreaux maintains that exports are costs Americans pay to receive the benefits of imports. In his view, there is no net benefit to having more jobs or industries in areas in which the Chinese have developed a comparative advantage. As he explained to John Stossel, the result of China’s currency manipulation is an opportunity for Americans to specialize in more rewarding jobs in the service sector.

Don Boudreaux explains the harms of a War on Trade and the benefits to Americans of trade with China.

The ironclad Bob Zadek rule of Government intervention holds that whenever government declares “war” to solve a problem, the problem gets worse.

The President has somewhat backed off of his tweet “hereby ordering” U.S. companies to stop doing business in China, but he seems stuck in the zero-sum thinking of his economic advisor Peter Navarro, who insists that the U.S. must mirror the mercantilist approach China has chosen to our own destruction.

What John Bolton’s advice is to foreign policy, Peter Navarro’s advice is to trade — a misguided American exceptionalism that puts us a great risk of losing the traditions of peace and free markets that made us great.

We also discuss the wisdom (folly?) and (un)constitutionality of executive orders regulating trade under The International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Lastly, I ask Don why conservatives are suddenly embracing a more powerful executive, and aligning themselves with Elizabeth Warren’s “economic patriotism.”

Do Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation measures redeem his economic nationalism?

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A call for returning the power to declare war to the Congress

The last time Congress declared war was on December 8, 1941. In the years since then we have gone from a relatively limited executive branch — as spelled out in James Madison’s system of checks and balances — straight through the imperial presidency of undeclared wars in Korea and Vietnam, to a rogue Presidency in which all bets are off.

Historian, economist, and foreign policy expert Ivan Eland has written a new book linking the cancerous growth of the military and executive branch to Congress’s on-going abdication of responsibility.

War and the Rogue Presidency: Restoring the Republic after Congressional Failure is Eland’s latest with the Independent Institute. Senator Rand Paul calls it a must-read for “for anyone seeking a safer, freer, and more peaceful world.”

I’ve covered the growth of the administrative state dozens of times on my show, but Eland has a fresh take on how the erosion of checks and balances has taken place — not all at once, but in a ratcheting of executive power during wartime.

He shows how most major economic interventions have their origin in war: whether its taxes (i.e., income tax, progressive taxation, double taxation, tax withholding, tax expenditures, the estate tax, gas taxes, etc.) or social programs (i.e., Social Security, expansion of Medicaid, public housing and rent control, grants-in-aid to state).

Even government regulation of marriage, as opposed to the common law tradition, arose out of a Civil War interest in monitoring the moral activity of widows receiving pensions from the government.

Eland walks readers through this surprising history — including Abraham Lincoln’s “inept autocratic” wartime presidency — and the attempts by Congress to push back against growing executive authority.

Eventually, he brings us to the present, in which Congress has pretty much stopped trying to check the President’s authority.

Eland makes an especially convincing case for conservatives to oppose the “rogue presidency.” He writes:

CONSERVATIVES SHOULD BE leerier of jumping into wars, not only because wars kill and destroy and because the American superpower might become overextended, especially in a time of high national debt and fiscal crisis, but also because war makes the government — that is, the executive branch — expand rapidly at home, even in areas unrelated to national security.

President Trump and the current Republican Congress are at an inflection point. After so many decades endless wars, we may be finally reaching agreements in Afghanistan and elsewhere to bring troops home. Yet Trump continues to face stiff pressures from advisors like John Bolton, who not only warn against troop drawdowns in the Middle East, but seem to be banging the drum for war in other distant regions like Iran.

Listen now to learn how Congress can resume its constitutional authority to declare war, and constrain the rogue elements of the executive branch in their thirst for power.

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

How to Stop Left and Right from Colluding to Bring Back Old-Fashioned

Antitrust Regulation

At this point it’s fairly clear that “Big Tech” companies like Google, Apple and Twitter are in the tank for the Democrats. However, you can easily stay informed by diversifying your news sources and listening to shows like this one.

There’s no great threat to competition in the market for news and information – to the contrary, the internet has given us more options than we could have dreamed of.

Trump meanwhile is threatening to regulate his political enemies in tech like public utilities. Whether he realizes it or not, this puts him in league with some of the leading figures of the Progressive Era – like Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Brandeis set the precedent that led to a “Big-is-Bad” mentality of antitrust enforcement, which persisted well into the 20th century, and is now rearing its ugly head once again.

Ryan Young, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is at the frontlines of the antitrust issue. He’s noted the worrisome confluence (dare I say collusion?) between Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Republicans like Trump when it comes to the issue of regulating free markets in the name of “competition.”

He observes that this Orwellian notion tends to find support during periods of rising populism – such as today – despite the FTC’s abysmal track record of policing anti-competitive practices for the so-called “public interest.” Instead, the Department of Justice’s anti-trust division and the FTC have colluded with one another to maximize their own budgets while stifling innovation and creating an entire cottage industry in Washington D.C. for Microsoft lobbyists.

Young has a new, must-read series of blog posts explaining the flaws of antitrust regulation, as well as a paper titled “The Case Against Antitrust” [view Full Document as PDF]. We’ll break the topic down to basics this Sunday on the show of ideas, including the paradox of antitrust – namely that no monopoly can survive for long without favorable treatment from the government (often in the form of previous antitrust provisions).

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A government takeover of the US health care system has never looked more

plausible.

Harry Truman once remarked, “Give me a one-handed Economist. All my economists say 'on the one hand...', then 'but on the other…’”

In several states, politicians seem to be guided as if by these elusive one-handed economists in drafting legislation for single-payer healthcare.

In 2017, California’s state senate managed to pass a bill (still pending) that would force all Californians into a single, state-run health care system, but the state senate’s Appropriations Committee estimated it would cost more than twice the total state budget.

We can’t entirely blame politicians, since a majority of Americans seem to think that single-payer or “Medicare for All” would save them money and ensure access to healthcare.

But as Michael Munger has noted, the middleman – whether the notorious price-gouger or more mundane insurance broker – performs a vital service in a competitive market. Unfortunately, the health care market becomes less competitive with each new government intervention, so it’s no surprise that Americans are tired of the current system.

It’s time for a reality check.

Sally Pipes is the President and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute and author of several books dissecting the magical thinking that makes unworkable “Medicare for All” proposals so popular.

The False Promise of Single-Payer Health Care (2018) debunked the main claims made in favor of single payer. In January 2020, her latest book False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All will be released to coincide with what could be one of the most consequential elections in our history, as Democrats promise to remake a sector of the economy that constitutes 20% of total output.

Pipes joined me to review the unfounded claims made by demagogues like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, such as:

Single-payer increases quality – By most measures, the U.S. far outranks Canada and the UK in quality of care, including wait times and rates of recovery from serious illness. There’s a reason Canadians come to the U.S. for procedures.

Single payer saves money - “Between 2001 and 2016, spending by Canada’s provinces on health care shot up 116.4 percent. Costs are growing faster than the rest of the economy,” she writes.

In the book, we also learn that Medicare is the single biggest contributor to the national debt – around $400 billion per year.

As Cato’s Michael Cannon notes, “The Medicare program is a bonanza of centralized economic planning, special-interest lobbying, pricing errors, perverse incentives, low-quality care, improper payments, and fraud. To paraphrase Lenny Bruce, Medicare is so corrupt, it’s thrilling.”

This is the same program that Bernie Sanders wants to expand into the world’s largest and most generous health care system in the world.

Listen to my interview with Sally to learn the difference between Medicare for All and the “Public Option,” and why we must stay on guard against so-called moderate proposals that are designed to give way to fully socialized medicine.

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