The Bob Zadek Show

Dr. Morris Kleiner on Occupational Licensing

Erwan LeCorre, founder of the MovNat system, spent his childhood exploring

the French countryside. In young adulthood he scaled walls and practiced

free running (aka “Parkour”) on the streets of Paris. Today he leads an

international movement of natural movers reclaiming the techniques our

ancestors used to survive in a much wilder world.

A Senior RAND Corp political scientist says we should expect more from our

political discourse

Gene Healy analyzes the “Indispensable Remedy” in light of President

Trump’s “Conduct Unbecoming”

“Few, if any, of the Framers viewed the prospect of presidential impeachment with the unbridled horror common among intellectual leaders today. CEOs can be cashiered for “moral turpitude,” “unprofessional conduct,” and the like. Yet we’ve somehow managed to convince ourselves that the one job in America where you have to commit a felony to get fired is the one where you actually get nuclear weapons.” — Indispensable Remedy: The Broad Scope of the Constitution’s Impeachment Power

Calls for impeachment are growing louder by the day. Billionaire Tom Steyer has garnered nearly 7 million signatures through the “Need to Impeach” campaign, and with Democrats about to retake a majority in the House, Rep. Maxine Waters is saying that impeachment proceedings should begin immediately.

Much of this is partisan hype, and incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has already signaled that she will rein in her colleagues’ excesses. She recently commented that “when and if he breaks the law, that is when something like that would come up.” Allegations of campaign finance violations from Trump’s hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels could fall into this category, but most experts see this is as a flimsy justification.

However, there may still be valid reasons to use what James Madison called “the indispensable remedy” against Trump’s abuses of the executive office. Pelosi’s comments stem from a common misconception about impeachment that it can only be used when the law has been broken, when in fact it can be used to address a much wider range of “conduct unbecoming” to the Presidency.

Gene Healy, a Vice President at the Cato Institute, is trying to dispel this and other myths about impeachment. Without making a specific case for impeaching Trump (with all the partisan pitfalls that would entail), Healy’s latest white paper serves as a primer on the purpose, history, and scope of impeachment provisions. He concludes that the remedy is an important deterrent against the “incapacity, negligence, or perfidy of the Chief Magistrate.” He argues that impeachment has probably not been used often enough in the past 230 years when Presidents have exhibited these traits without technically breaking the law. Some of the Commander-in-Chief’s tweets are a prime example.

Healy is a leading critic of the “Cult of the Presidency,” which believes the office of the executive to be sacrosanct. The Founders would have abhorred the idea of the President being beyond reproach or — in the extreme case — removal from office. He joined me to discuss the Framers’ intention with respect to impeachment.

While most analyses are clouded with political bias and tribalism, Healy recognizes the danger in raising or lowering the bar for impeachment to suit the latest political winds. “What you think of Congress’ impeachment power shouldn’t depend on what you think of President Trump,” he writes, “Donald Trump isn’t going to be the last president we have, so it’s important to get this right.”

We did our best to get it right. You be the judge.

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Yoram Hazony takes on liberals of all stripes in his latest book, *The

Virtue of Nationalism* [Read more…]

Now that the government appears on the verge of shutdown over the issue of “the Wall,” it’s become impossible to ignore the resurgence of nationalist sentiment both in America and abroad.

What should a libertarian make of trends like Brexit in the UK, and the election of a self-identified nationalist like Donald Trump to the American presidency? Are the philosophies of libertarianism compatible with the principles of an international order made up of a multitude of nationalist countries?

On the one hand, nation states have a centuries-long history of waging war against one another, colonizing and oppressing foreign lands and peoples, and violating the natural rights of their own citizens.

On the other hand, international governing bodies like the European Union and United Nations also pose a threat to the self-determination of the American people and, by extension, our liberty as individuals. Perhaps a realignment is needed.

In his new book The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony makes an intellectually rigorous case for nationalism in general and for the specific case of his own country, Israel. Hazony, President of the Zionist Herzl Institute, argues that nationalism is the only stable alternative to a creeping “liberal internationalism,” which he says is merely a modern version of the age-old concept of empire. Sometimes referred to as “globalism” or “transnationalism,” this rules-based order seeks to secure global peace and grow the scope of its power by limiting the ability of nations to chart their own course.

Against the twin extremes of anarchy and internationalist empire, Hazony affirms the nation-state as the ideal political unit for securing individual liberties — supporting them within a context of a particular shared culture, mutual loyalty, and physical borders.

I chafe at some of the ideas in his book, like closed borders, but he makes too many important points not to engage them.

I discussed the Virtue of Nationalism with Yoram for the full hour. It was hardly enough time to dive into the full thesis of his book but we did our best.

The Virtues of Internationalism
At its core, the book is a critique of liberalism — not just progressive liberalism, but also the liberalism of Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek.

It may come as a surprise to libertarians that these giants of classical liberalism thought we needed to move toward a global marketplace, in which borders wouldn’t interfere with free trade, and where peace would be enforced by an over-arching world state or international federation.

In his masterwork, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition, Mises writes:

“The greatest ideological question that mankind has ever faced… is… whether we shall succeed in creating throughout the world a frame of mind… [of] nothing less than the unqualified, unconditional acceptance of liberalism. Liberal thinking must permeate all nations, liberal principles must pervade all political institutions, if the prerequisites of peace are to be created and the causes of war eliminated.”

He elsewhere advocates for “a world super-state really deserving of the name… that would be capable of assuring the nations the peace they require.”

Neither Mises nor Hayek elaborated greatly on how this super-state would operate, or what kinds of checks and balances it would have, leaving the classical liberal in an uncomfortable position of speculating as to what this might look like and how it would prevent the usual problems of big government.

As listeners to my shows (and readers of my new book) know, I believe that federalism — i.e., delegating powers to states and localities — offers a solution to the most bitter political debates within the United States, and could be applied to any other country with a large diverse population. Hayek insisted that individualism was compatible with the mutual loyalties among citizens that Hazony thinks are essential to a body politic. Whether that body is a nation, a state, a county or a neighborhood seems less important than that it is voluntarily chosen by the members through free movement.

However, while an international federation could theoretically guarantee economic and civil liberties to members of nation states while leaving them autonomous in most other areas, Hazony says that such a system will always tend to oppose local, particular interests in favor of the universal interests of the empire. One argument for federalism is the ability of states to experiment with different policies to see what works best. Hazony notes that this same logic can be applied to nation states, and has been used by proponents of the competitive governance movement as a reason to “let 1,000 nations bloom.”

Liberal internationalism clamps down on such experiments, forcing a “one-size-fits-all” solution on countries that may not desire democratic governance or free markets. Can a classical liberal say with certainty that the economic system we support should be foisted on the rest of the world? Hazony says we should question this idea.

The Vices of Nationalism
Of course, the elephant in the room is the reputation nationalism has for inciting ethnic divisions and, in the extremes, racial hatred. Nazi Germany is the most obvious example of national pride and self-determination run amok. Hazony answers this with evidence that Hitler’s plans were in fact rooted in an imperial ambition that can be traced back to Immanuel Kant’s dream of a perpetual peace upheld by a “world state.” Before this, European monarchs joined hands with the Catholic church to extend the universal (temporal and spiritual) authority of a Holy Roman Empire.

Just like the Roman Emperors of an earlier age, Hitler sought to enforce a peace throughout Europe and the rest of the world through an imposed international order buttressed by German hegemony. The “Pax Germana” was prevented by the strong independent nations of the United States and United Kingdom. Since the war, however, mainstream thought among governing elites has tended to view these independent nations as a greater threat to peace than a new international order that limits national independence.

Hazony notes a strange a paradox since World War II, in which the extermination of Jews and Slavs has been used by one side — namely liberal internationalists — as the primary argument against nationalism, while a large faction of Jewish people have seen it as the decisive reason for the existence of an independent state of Israel.

You’ll have to read his entire book to get the full nuance of his perspective, and I encourage you to do so. Whether or not you plan to read the book, you won’t want to miss Hazony’s erudite perspective, combining history, political philosophy, and theology to make the case that liberty is best preserved within distinct and sovereign nations.

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Trump’s Proposed Executive Order to End Birth Right Citizenship is

Unconstitutional, But Will that Stop It?

Few sections of the U.S. Constitution are richer or more uplifting than the “Citizenship Clause.” My eyes tear up a bit just reading the words:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The 14th Amendment fulfilled the Founders’ original promise of freedom for all, and enshrined the bedrock principle of equality before the law.

This first section was implemented to reverse the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, which infamously denied citizenship to African Americans — even to freed slaves. Today, it is also widely understood to guarantee “birth right” citizenship to the children of immigrants — undocumented or otherwise. This right was first defended by the Republicans of Lincoln’s era and affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1898 when a case arose questioning the citizenship of a child of Chinese immigrants.

However, President Trump has turned an open-and-shut question of constitutionality into a political football — declaring that he will end birth right citizenship with the stroke of a pen. Executive orders, though not mentioned as a power granted in the Constitution, have increasingly been seen as a way for the President to do an end-run around a gridlocked Congress.

Nowhere has the debate over executive orders been more contentious than on the topic of immigration. In 2014, Barack Obama took the lack of bipartisan immigration reform as his cue to offer temporary legal status and an indefinite reprieve from deportation to the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. at the time. He did so via executive order. Libertarians warned of the dangerous precedent this would allow for future presidents. With Trump’s threat of an executive order to end birth right citizenship, we are seeing this fear confirmed.

Sheldon Gilbert, VP for Content and Development and a Senior Fellow for Constitutional Studies with the National Constitution Center, joins the show to discuss whether Trump’s plan is constitutional (hint: it’s not).

In the spirit of intellectual honesty, Gilbert accurately summarized the case against birth right citizenship for the Daily Mail: If you do not owe allegiance to the United States, some argue, you do not have citizenship. Justice Antonin Scalia was sympathetic to this argument — saying that those here illegally are not bound by this allegiance, even though they are still compelled to follow the laws of the U.S. However, many scholars from both sides of the aisle have pointed out the mental acrobatics required for this interpretation to hold up. Many slaves were brought here “illegally” before the Civil War, yet these were exactly the people that Section I of the 14th Amendment sought to naturalize.

Here’s a preview of my take:
I often ask people who oppose illegal immigration what part they object to — the “illegal” part, or the “immigrant.” If it is the illegal part, there is a simple solution: the U.S. should naturalize any and all undocumented immigrants who are willing to pledge their allegiance to the flag. If it is the “immigrant” part, then I have little more to say to the person, since the U.S. is a country built and constantly renewed by immigrants.

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Institute for Justice Attorney Samuel Gedge on the future of Civil Asset

Forfeiture, 12/9