Limited government is a recurring theme of The Bob Zadek Show, invoked by host Bob Zadek and by guests from several disciplines. The excerpts do not present a single definition; they show the phrase used to make arguments about coercion, about the scope of federal funding conditions, about the administrative state, and about the difference between reducing government and hollowing it out.
Government as the coercive institution
John Allison, identified by Bob Zadek as CEO of the Cato Institute and author of The Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure, gives the most explicit account of why government should be limited. Zadek frames the point first: government is special because it is the only institution authorized to use coercion, force, and take away liberty, and therefore allocating power to government means allocating power to the only institution that can coerce you; that is why, in Zadek’s words, “we must be stingy about giving power to the government” John Allison on the Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure (2015).
Allison agrees and extends the claim. He says government is dangerous, and that throughout history, next to old age and disease, government has killed more people than any other cause — hundreds of millions, far more than terrorists and far more than the mafia. He states that we need government to protect individual rights so we are not fighting each other with guns, but that it needs to be very limited because it is extraordinarily dangerous, and that the more power it has, the more power it abuses John Allison on the Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure (2015).
Allison later states the mission of the Cato Institute as creating a free and prosperous society based on the principles of individual liberty, free markets, limited government, and peace. He says the institute believes government ought to stay out of your pocketbook and out of your bedroom, that it is not conservative, not pro-business but pro-free markets, and not liberal, while agreeing with liberals on some issues — that government should not be in the marriage business, that adults get to do bad things for themselves as long as they do not hurt anybody else, and that as a free person one gets to make that kind of choice about marijuana John Allison on the Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure (2015).
Agencies that fail their primary function
A caller to the program, Anne in San Francisco, offers a different route to the same conclusion. She says she believes in a limited, smaller government and is not exactly a Libertarian, then argues that government agencies paid to perform a primary function and unable to perform it should be eliminated. Her example is immigration paperwork: she asks how she as a citizen is supposed to become an INS agent and check papers of everybody who comes to her door or anybody she hires, since she has no idea whether their paperwork is false or correct. She names Homeland Security, INS and ICE as agencies whose primary goal is to know who comes into the country and who leaves, when they do, and when they have extended their visa, and says they cannot seem to do that. If she has to do that work, she says, she should be paid, rather than paying taxes to support the agencies The Triumph of Principle Over Politics (2012). Zadek responds by telling her she is a Libertarian and welcoming her to the club.
Limiting government to behavior, not thought
R. Shep Melnick, described by Zadek as the author of a book on the transformation of Title IX, states that he is not a libertarian and tends to be more of a liberal Democrat, but says he fully agrees with Zadek that the founding principle of this country is limited government, which means above all limiting the role of government to affect overt behavior and not to try to change people’s basic thinking Title IX’s Transformation: R. Shep Melnick on the New Civil Rights Debate (2018).
The context is Melnick’s account of Title IX. He says the statute was originally designed to end institutional barriers to education by women, that in 1972 there were important barriers — programs explicitly prohibiting women from being part of them, and rampant sex discrimination in hiring in higher education — and that those barriers fell very rapidly. The transformation, he says, was to go from those institutional barriers to educational opportunity to trying to change stereotypes about sex and gender and sexuality in general, not just among students and faculty but among the public at large. He argues the underlying claim is that educational equality requires changing underlying stereotypes and how people think about sex and sex differences, which gets into gender identity Title IX’s Transformation: R. Shep Melnick on the New Civil Rights Debate (2018).
Zadek draws the constitutional conclusion, saying that freedom of conscience was sacred during the founding era and that it is not the business of government to affect what people think, and describing the transformation as something akin to thought police. Melnick says what bothers him more than anything else about these regulations is how prescriptive they have become and how they have tried to change the culture on the basis of a very thin legislative platform Title IX’s Transformation: R. Shep Melnick on the New Civil Rights Debate (2018).
Principled scaling back versus populist demolition
Terry Moe, in a discussion of populism after Trump, distinguishes a principled effort to limit the reach of government from what he says populists do. On his account, the principled version holds that the problem with government is that it is too big, and then asks how to scale back its reach in a thoughtful, serious way. The populist, by contrast, lays waste to the vast apparatus without arguing that government should not be in a given business. Moe says this is not an argument for limited government or conservatism, that there is no reduction of the size of government under Trump, and that what results is a much less effective, hollowed-out administrative state Populism After Trump (2021).
Moe adds that populists can take on the administrative state because they lack a constructive agenda and are in the business of attacking the system — anti-expert, anti-science, anti-professional. He says Trump never had a constructive domestic or international agenda and tore away at agencies such as the State Department, causing hundreds of top-level foreign service officers to depart. Moe argues that critics of the administrative state need to think more clearly about what kind of government a modern, complex society needs, that there are 300 million people in this country who think those problems need to be addressed, and that the administrative state is how they get addressed, held accountable by the representatives elected at the top of government Populism After Trump (2021).
Effective government as a precondition
Mark Lutter, introduced by Zadek as founder and executive director of the Center for Innovative Governance Research, holds a PhD from George Mason University and studied under Don Boudreaux. In Zadek’s framing, Lutter has been proposing and educating people on the economic benefits of rule of law, a common law system, the ability to enforce contracts, and honest government, with which economic growth is almost unlimited. Zadek states the lesson as being that libertarians do not simply want less government — that is only part of the equation — and that what is needed is effective government, because there are areas where without effective government economic growth is almost impossible. Zadek says Lutter will explain economic miracles in China that could not have taken place without the creation of free cities The End of Nation-States? (2018).
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no agreed definition of limited government, no account of how the several senses used by Allison, Melnick, Moe and the caller relate to one another, and no discussion of constitutional text, amendments or judicial doctrine beyond Melnick’s remarks on federal funding conditions and freedom of conscience. Several excerpts break off before the guest speaks — Lutter’s segment ends at his name, and the DiLorenzo and Dalrymple segments end before their answers — so their positions on limited government are not stated here. No excerpt states a founding date, a bill number, or the holding of any case.