The Bob Zadek Show

The Presidential election costs about a billion dollars and it captures our attention for 15 months. Debates are held, we review the voting records of candidates, check their IQs, college transcripts, the intensity of their faith, relationships with spouses and core beliefs. With all this, one can only wonder if the process produces the best President. Do we as voters and as a nation know which qualities produce the best Chief Executive? In this episode, Bob spends an hour with Thomas Fleming, a presidential scholar who is also one of our greatest living historians and he explains what history can reveal about the nature the Presidency. As Santayana has taught us, “Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.” An hour with Thomas Fleming goes by like 5 minutes. You’ll not want to miss this timely show.

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Thomas Jefferson valued higher education; perhaps more than any other Founding Father. He envisioned a University system where students and faculty would explore ideas in a bastion of free expression. That did not turn out to be the case. Our colleges censor speech and have become citadels of political correctness. Saying something which offends another student or speaking an unpopular thought will get you thrown out. Disagreeing with your professor is likely to earn you an “F.” Think I’ve overstated the case? Harvey Silverglate, Co-founder and Chairman of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education joins Bob to talk about the the ugly truth of “higher” education. The good news is that at the end of our show you’ll feel justified to stop payment on your alumni contributions. Let’s reclaim our colleges and remove the shackles on free speech which they impose.

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Visit Utopia. Fly to Atlanta and take a short car trip to Sandy Spring, Georgia, the city that efficiently outsourced everything. Are they the wave of the future? Their budget is about half of what it would be with city employees doing the work! Private toll roads vs. crowded public highways. Fed Ex vs. the Post Office. Which do you prefer? Please join Bob and Adrian Moore of Reason Magazine in this encore episode for an hour of light and breezy privatization fun. Sell the parking meters! Sell the airports. Sell air traffic control! Sell the prisons! Get rid of Public Service Unions, their pensions and their padded payrolls. Let business do business and government take care of government.

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Ben Shapiro is an attorney, entertainer, journalist and blogger who has set out the link between Hollywood and the American Left. He argues that the movie moguls and TV producers have come to be the functional equivalent of the Democratic Party and political messages are surreptitiously embedded in films and sitcoms. What could the propaganda czars of Russia, China and North Korea learn from the residents of Beverly Hills 90210? In this episode, Ben joins Bob to discuss his highly talked about and controversial new book “Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV.” Forget the fictional villains such as Hannibal Lector. They’re just there to distract us from the real ones on and behind the big and small screens! You won’t want to miss this show.

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S&P downgraded the credit rating on our country’s bonds. How did this happen? What does it mean to you and me? Most importantly, how does our country get its AAA rating back? If we are all going down in financial flames, should we file the biggest bankruptcy case in the history of the planet with the World Court? In this episode, Bob is joined by Reason Magazine’s Associate Editor, Peter Suderman. They will Standard and Poor’s downgrade, what it says about how our country is governed and how it reflects the financial stewardship of the Obama administration. Bob has spent 45 years in the world of credit. No one knows it better, except perhaps his guest, Peter.

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Did you see this headline? Probably not, since it was never written. However, it has happened. Not just with GE but with General Motors, Big Oil and many other American business icons. Crony Capitalism has replaced the free market. Business/ government cross breeding has created business mutants which look like business but act like government. In this episode, Bob is joined by University of Chicago economics professor Luigi Zingales. Together they discuss “Saving Capitalism From the Capitalists,” which happens to be the title of Dr. Zingales’ recent book and says it all. Capitalism is being destroyed from within. We’re losing our entrepreneurial spirit. American business is too dependent on government and with governmental support comes governmental control. Is it too late?

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The current budget/deficit/spending fight among the President, the House and the Senate is setting the stage for the election of 2012. The Jefferson/Adams election contest of 1800 affected the size and reach of the federal government. 2012 will be a rerun, but the stakes are even higher. What is the current battle really all about? Money? Yes, but only to a point. Please join Bob Zadek and Libertarian economics professor and prolific blogger, as well as frequent media guest Don Boudreaux tomorrow in this episode, when the answer to the key question is demystified. “Do we look to Modern Europe Government for guidance, or to the Enlightenment? Sarkozy or Locke?”

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Fear of crime is so yesterday. At one time, violent crime was on everyone’s mind but today, money is the big issue. We are plagued by out of control deficits, powerful public employee union rip-offs, out of control government spending and the expensive failed war on drugs. These issues all come together in this episode as Veronique de Rugy, Senior Research Fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center discusses “Prison Math” with Bob. American Exceptionalism is at risk because the United States hosts the world’s largest prison population. Are we truly “the land of the free” or are we all prisoners of our failed prison system?

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Last Sunday, Nick Gillespie was Bob’s special guest. He is the Editor-In-Chief of Reason.tv and Reason.com. Reason’s tagline is “Free Minds and Free Markets.” Nothing says it better. Bob and Nick discussed the evils of government subsidized art (indeed, the evils of government subsidized anything) and Nick’s new book “The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America” which will be published on June 28. They also put the Republican Presidential candidates through a Libertarian filter to see who makes it through. Nick is a frequent television guest of John Stossel and Judge Napolitano.

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In this episode, Bob interviewed our first president, George Washington. Well, not quite. But close. With great pride and excitement, we welcomed Thomas Fleming, one of our nation’s leading historians, biographer of Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, past President of the Society of American Historians and author of the popular blog “Channeling George Washington”, to our show. Bob and Tom discussed money and politics, then and now. What did the Founders intend to be the relationship between the two? Is money a political pollutant, or its lifeblood? Tom Fleming shared his lifetime of study to the important and timely issue, and put it all into keen historical perspective.

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