The Bob Zadek Show

“The medical establishment has become the major threat to health.” — Ivan

Illich

Does an overweight patient deserve more resources from the government on account of his condition?

Should Washington D.C. treat mental disorders and addiction as “diseases,” like Parkinson’s, and subsidize treatment accordingly?

As healthcare spending approaches nearly 1/5 of the US economy, we might stop to ask whether the medical profession as a whole is able to think clearly about social and political questions like these.

Theodore Dalrymple is a retired British psychiatrist and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who has taken upon himself the unenviable task of reading through every weekly issue of the 2018 New England Journal of Medicine. His new book, False Positive: A Year of Error, Omission, and Political Correctness in the New England Journal of Medicine, discovers a persistent bias from the editors of one of the world’s most respected medical journals.

In it, the lay-person is treated to Dalrymple’s wryly humorous writing and impeccable handle on complex sociological issues and statistical analysis, which often confound the esteemed contributors to the Journal. His most remarkable discovery is perhaps the information the authors and researchers fail to mention in their prestigious studies and reviews of the relevant literature.

For example, in assessing the efficacy of a Cholera vaccine in Haiti, the authors diligently note the year the disease arrived, but fail to mention that it was a UN peacekeeping envoy from Nepal that introduced the deadly virus to the island in 2010. This oversight reveals the taboo among elites against criticizing helper organizations like the UN, despite mounting evidence of their incompetence.

Or, take the treatment of addiction — an increasingly important issue in the medical field given the opioid epidemic of the last few decades. The addict is often presented as a patient whose illness relieves him from the blame and cost of treatment. The Journal’s editorial voice never waivers from this politically-correct stance, even though a reasonably smart high schooler can understand that addicts still retain their agency (and culpability) while in the grips of the substance. To suggest otherwise is to dehumanize and infantilize people, especially the lower class.

His innumerable books underline a consistent theme — that the upper classes (including doctors) are all too willing to give the lower classes a free pass for harmful behaviors, and aren’t doing them any favors by doing so.

Theodore joined me for the full hour to discuss the reasons for ever-increasing bureaucratization and socialization of medicine, and how these trends are encouraging unhealthy behaviors at increasing cost to the taxpayer.

Dalrymple — colloquially known as the “skeptical doctor” — is like a responsible adult administering a bitter pill of rationality to the less mature members of his profession, who think they can “make the world a better place” through merely wishing it were so.

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The LP chair on the challenges for third parties and the trouble with

Libertarian—Republican alliances.

Ben Powell reminds the world how much better life is (and beer) under

freedom

There is a disturbing trend of politicians and their enablers trying to make socialism cool again. Larry White gives it a fitting label — “Murder Chic.”

First came the “communist party” shirts — a clever-enough cartoon depicting Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Castro, and Mao having a rowdy time.

Then those hideous fur hats came into vogue.

But perhaps most unsettling is Kristen Ghodsee’s new book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, which has the truly Orwellian subtitle, “And Other Arguments for Economic Independence.”

Let that sink in for a second…

Luckily, few are falling for the propaganda.

Ghodsee’s book sales are in the basement (#432,614 in Books and #776 in Communism & Socialism alone), while Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World is already ranked #1 among new releases in the “Beers” category; 38,000th (and climbing) overall — a full week before the release!

The book is a hilarious new broadside by the The Independent Institute’s Ben Powell and his co-author Robert Lawson.

“In Cuba… the central planners decided they only need two kinds [of beer]… Both taste like Budweiser that’s been left out in the sun.”

Powell and Lawson know that academic arguments did not cause the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rather, it was the superiority of goods and services available in West Berlin that forced the Soviet tyrants to let their people go… shopping. The book demonstrates this with flair—comparing the swill from former Soviet-bloc countries to the diverse and alluring brews of the free world.

What better way to dismantle the new wave of socialist propaganda than to launch Socialism Sucks to the top of the Amazon best-seller rankings before its launch?

Ben Powell returns to the show this Sunday to share his journey “drinking his way through the unfree world.”

Want to annoy a commie?

A good buzz may be the most effective form of persuasion out there.

Help set Ben and Bob’s book to #1 in the Communism in Socialism category. Listen to the show now.

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A professor locates the philosophical roots of centralized administration

When Donald Trump arrived in Washington D.C., the establishment went nuts. Even more so than the left-wing enclaves of San Francisco and New York, our nation’s capitol was uniquely vulnerable to the disruption Trump represented to the status quo.

Some likened him to a wrecking ball — others to an outsider, “draining the swamp.”

And in many ways, Trump has paradoxically used the power of his office to dismantle many of the executive agencies and authority that previous presidents have co-opted from the legislative branch.

At the same time, the imbalance of powers did not come about over night, and it will be impossible for any single politician to dismantle what many call “the Deep State.”

More precisely, what Trump is grappling with is an administrative state with deep roots going back to at least the Progressive Era, and likely much further as my next guest illustrates.

John Marini has written the definitive book on the historical and philosophical origins of the administrative state in his new book, “Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century.”

Marini finds the ethos behind increasingly centralized authority in the very idea of “Progress.” Philosophers like Friedrich Hegel envisioned progressing being ushered in by a sort of secular deity — a government possessing vast scientific knowledge of the various aspects of governance, capable of remedying the most intractable social woes.

Unfortunately for Hegel and his political descendants (i.e., Woodrow Wilson, FDR, etc.), the American Constitution enshrined a very different idea of the proper role of government.

The Founders’ Constitution expressly limited the power of government and demanded that laws be made by political representatives of the people — not faraway unaccountable bureaucrats.

When De Toqueville came to America, he observed a robust civil society that seemed to cut against the alleged need for an administrative authority to manage the affairs of the citizenry. But he also saw that a creeping “democratic despotism” could arise from centralized administration such as the current alphabet soup of executive agencies that now interfere in the most minute affairs of American life.

In this episode of the show of ideas, not attitude, we put the capstone on the world’s longest running radio series on the administrative state. Bob welcomes Marini to discuss his under-appreciated scholarship, and to provide a definitive guide to the “Deep State” for a media that seems to never quite know what it means when it uses the term.

Marini is a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, is a graduate of San Jose State University, and earned his Ph.D. in government at the Claremont Graduate School.

He began to study what we now call the administrative state over 40 years ago. In Unmasking the Administrative State, we learn how bureaucracy caters to special interests and obstructs any attempts by Congress or the President to bring it down to size. He takes on the notion that politics is only for the experts and argues that the only way to restore America is by imbuing it with a spirit of democratic participation.

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Dr. Jeffrey Singer, an Arizona surgeon and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, has a message that some Americans will consider a bitter pill to swallow:
People will always use drugs, and many will harm themselves and others in the process.

The government’s response to this fact of life has been a multi-billion dollar failed War on Drugs.

The best evidence suggests that not only has this war failed to achieve its intended aim, it has actually made the problems of drug abuse and overdose worse.

The “Doctor for Liberty” returned to the show to update me on the latest research into so-called “harm reduction” strategies that have proved much more successful than the War on Drugs in limiting addiction and fatalities from heroine overdose.

We also discussed the latest challenge to ObamaCare, which is working its way through to courts and appears likely to reach the Supreme Court before 2020. If you’ve worried about the Supreme Court becoming too political, you haven’t seen anything yet.

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A Washington insider reflects on the growing imbalance of powers - Sunday,

8-9am PACIFIC

5 things to know about The Vanishing Congress:
The Book - The Vanishing Congress: Reflections on Politics in Washington [Amazon]

The Topic - Former FBI Director James Comey recently denied the existence of a “deep state.” Rather, he says there is a “deep culture” of so-called meritocratic technocracy. That sounds like deep euphemism to me, but it’s worth asking what this vague and sinister term actually means before asking whether it exists.

Jeffrey Bergner, author of The Vanishing Congress, is a long-time Washington insider who has found the roots of something like a deep state in the legislative branch’s abdication of its one job: to make the laws. This might sound like a dream come true for libertarians, but since nature abhors a vacuum, this vital function ends up getting usurped by unelected bureaucrats and unaccountable district judges.

The Guest - Jeffrey Bergner served as Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs from 2005 until July 2008. He is the President and Managing Financial Partner of Bergner Bockorny, Inc., as well as an adjunct professor at the National Security Studies Program at Georgetown University.

The Problem - Bergner says that Congress has ceded too much of its authority to the executive branch — with its mutant bureaucratic army — and broken down the checks and balances that the Founders designed to ensure that government represents the people and not its own entrenched interests. When the executive branch is given such broad leverage to implement laws without express authorization of Congress, presidents and executive agencies are encouraged to legislate by fiat. Then come the executive orders…

The Solution - For starters, Bergner suggests that Congress would be 20% more efficient with 20% fewer staff. I’m conflicted, since I like the idea of shrinking government, but I’m not so sure about increasing congressional “efficiency.” Is getting more stuff done always a good thing?

I’ll question Bergner on this idea, as well as his proposal to reduce debate on cabinet nominations from 30 hours to 2 hours, and how direct election of senators forever changed the political landscape in America.

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