In the vocabulary of The Bob Zadek Show, “government failure” names a specific diagnosis: the defect lies not in the market but in the incentives of the institutions that govern it. The phrase is used most sharply by Mike Munger, who applies it to the money in politics. A corporate chief executive, Munger argues, has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, and is therefore obliged to spend money on government programs and to approach members of Congress, because doing so increases profits. Blaming the corporation for this, he says, is like blaming a dog for eating out of the garbage. The remedy is not to change the dog but to change the playing field, because government needs to stop selling policy. Munger’s conclusion is explicit: he does not see this as a market failure but as a government failure, since the reason there is so much money in politics is that elected officials, facing no competition, have put policy up for sale Who Wants to Buy a Politician? With Mike Munger (2015).
Failure as financial success
Thomas DiLorenzo supplies the most general statement of the concept. In the private sector, he says, a business that serves its customers better makes money and one that serves them poorly loses money. In government the relationship is inverted: failure is financial success. The worse an agency performs at whatever it is supposed to be doing — educating children in government schools, getting people out of poverty — the more tax dollars it takes, because the stated reason for the failure is always that it did not have enough money. DiLorenzo offers NASA as an illustration, saying that after blowing up a rocket ship years ago the agency received a 50% budget increase. He also describes a charity in Baltimore that received a $100,000 grant from the state of Maryland to provide employment for Russian refugees; the grant produced one part-time, 20-hour-a-week secretarial job, while about 30 people enjoyed a lunch at an expensive restaurant at taxpayers’ expense. His summary is that transferring money from the private sector to the government sector impoverishes us always and in every way Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022).
The same episode extends the argument to taxation. Zadek contends that the 87,000 new tax collectors amount to nothing other than a tax increase, because what people care about is how much tax they pay, not what rate the statute states; paying more because a deduction was disallowed is still writing a check that was not written before. He frames the measure as transferring wealth from the private sector to the government, and asks who should decide how a dollar is spent: government, deciding on the basis of politics, or 300 million Americans making private decisions. DiLorenzo adds that a top economic adviser to Biden argued that collecting more taxes would leave ordinary people with less to spend and thereby reduce inflation, when the same money goes to the government and will be spent, increasing inflation Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022).
The TSA as a case study
Jim Bovard’s discussion of the Transportation Security Administration supplies the show’s most detailed instance. Bovard describes an agency that relies on fear-mongering and arbitrary power, comparing it to the secret police of some European nations in the 1800s and of many nations in the 20th century — a comparison Zadek glosses as the Stasi in East Germany. Bovard’s point is the uncertainty: small bottles one week, a belt the next, a left shoe the week after, as though some secret wisdom lay behind arbitrary policies that, on the agency’s own rulings and court disclosures, amount to one idiotic thing after another Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015).
The concrete figure the episode returns to is the Inspector General’s finding, from a confidential report that was leaked, that agents testing the screening process were able to smuggle weapons and bombs past screeners and whole-body scanners 95% of the time. Bovard adds that the TSA has not caught any terrorist, despite spending billions and hassling millions of Americans. When Zadek raises the agency’s likely reply — that terrorists do not try because they expect to be caught — he notes that this is belied by a 95% failure rate. Bovard attributes such safety as exists to structural changes, including tighter cockpits and the fact that passengers would no longer be passive in a hijacking, rather than to screening Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015).
Zadek’s framing of the TSA is that it inverts a core principle of constitutional law, under which government encroaching on basic constitutional rights must do so in the least intrusive way possible and must assure Americans that no less intrusive way exists. The TSA, he says, is the opposite: the most expensive and least effective measure rather than the least expensive and most effective, intruding on the liberty of all Americans with the broadest brush possible. He calls the TSA, by the dictionary definition of terrorism as instilling terror to accomplish a political goal, a terrorist organization, arguing that the terrorists spent perhaps a million dollars on box cutters, explosives in underwear and a shoe heel, and then could have retired, leaving behind a country that spent possibly a trillion dollars over 15 years. Bovard declines the label, preferring the secret-police comparison Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015).
Zadek also treats 9/11 as an intelligence failure that could have been prevented by better communication among intelligence agencies — a government failure whose fix was yet another failure, since TSA does not prevent 9/11 events and the link makes no sense. Bovard calls it an intelligence and law enforcement failure, citing warning signs the feds disregarded, and adds that foreign policy was making more enemies than people recognized Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015).
Structural grievance and populism
In a later episode, William Howell uses the phrase in a different register. Discussing populism after Trump, he says that Trump’s rise in 2016 was not merely a fluke of Hillary Clinton’s bad campaign — she did win the popular vote — because Trump emerged from a deep bench of well-established, well-funded, experienced Republican primary candidates as an outsider tapping into anger, disaffection and grievance. Howell argues that the last four years let Americans see what populism looks like and the threat it represents, and that it would be a mistake to conclude that 2016 was a fluke and that normalcy has returned. He calls for recognizing the deep structural foundations of government failure that led to the rise of that anger and disaffection, and what the anger then set into motion: the capture of a major American party and the degradation of small-d democratic commitments Populism After Trump (2021).
Across episodes: the same diagnosis, different domains
The excerpts show the concept applied in three distinct domains rather than developed over time. Munger (2015) locates government failure in the sale of policy to the highest bidder; Bovard (2015) locates it in an entrenched security agency that fails its own tests and cannot be dislodged; DiLorenzo (2022) states the general rule that failure is financial success in government; and Howell (2021) applies the phrase to the structural grievances underlying populism. No excerpt responds to or revises another’s treatment, and the excerpts show no development of the idea from one episode to the next.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not define government failure formally, nor do they distinguish it from related concepts such as market failure beyond Munger’s single contrast. They give no account of the TSA’s founding statute, the name of the Inflation Reduction Act provision at issue, or the case law behind the least-intrusive-means principle Zadek paraphrases. No guest offers a general theory of when government failure can be corrected, and the Howell excerpt breaks off before the discussion of populism’s style versus substance proceeds.