“Natural rights” is a recurring term of art on The Bob Zadek Show, used by the host and his guests to name entitlements said to belong to persons by virtue of their humanity rather than by grant of any government. Across the episodes examined here, the concept is applied to freedom of movement, to the fruits of one’s labor, to self-defense, and to the liberties Bob Zadek describes as protected in the Constitution. Guests differ over who holds these rights and how securely they can be relied upon.
Freedom of movement
Bob Zadek states his own position on immigration in terms of natural rights. He tells Jayant Bhandari that he looks upon “the right to travel as an inherent human right, as a natural right,” and that people have the right to improve their lives and to move freely across borders, or should have Capitalism and Morality: Twin Pillars of the West (2017). He adds that he enjoys the benefits of living in the United States because of the accident of birth, and that he feels uncomfortable denying those benefits to others because of the accident of their birth. Bhandari’s reply does not contest the existence of the right; he argues that Europeans are the only rational societies he has known, that East Asia is increasingly rational, and that the rest of the world is “extremely irrational, superstitious, and tribal,” a condition he says takes at least a millennia to change. On his account, a culture of reason does not mix with a culture of lack of reason, and immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia who experience European compassion react not with gratitude but with the view that Europeans are stupid.
A later episode develops the moral argument for open borders more explicitly. Bob Zadek puts the question to Alex Nowrasteh by setting aside the data-driven case: assuming there were no tangible benefit to Americans from more open borders, could an argument still be made on other grounds, and he characterizes the right to travel to improve the life of oneself and one’s family as a natural right that all humans have solely by dint of their humanness What Part of Illegal Immigration Are You Against? Alex Nowrasteh Returns (2019). Nowrasteh agrees that a strong ethical and moral argument exists, and attributes it to Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist. Douglass, he says, made the argument several times when opposing efforts by labor unions and nationalists in the 19th century to block Chinese immigration, arguing in numerous speeches that even if Chinese immigration competed with black workers and lowered their wages, that was immaterial: the natural rights of Chinese immigrants, endowed to them because of their mere humanity, trumped any material or economic self-interest of any group in the United States, including a group of free slaves and black Americans like himself. Nowrasteh distinguishes his own position from Douglass’s, saying he is not as hardcore, and allows that if the harms were very bad it might be acceptable to close the borders. He says there is really no evidence of that, places the burden of proof on restrictionists, and argues the default for libertarians and for people who believe in individual human freedom should be to allow people to move.
Property, the fruits of labor, and constitutional text
Timothy Sandefur describes drafting a version of the Bill of Rights that retains existing protections for free exercise of religion and freedom of speech and clarifies rights whose meaning has been doubted Timothy Sandefur on The Libertarian Constitution (2021). The two main concerns he identifies with the current constitutional regime in the United States are inadequate protection for private property rights and economic freedom generally, and inadequate protection of privacy rights. He says the draft borrowed from the Missouri Constitution a protection for the fruits of your labor, reading: “No government shall prohibit the free exercise of religion or abridge freedom of speech or conscience, or infringe on the right of the fruits of one’s labors or the right to live a peaceful life of one’s choosing.” The idea behind protecting the right to the fruits of one’s labors, he says, is economic liberty and private property rights: a person should have the right to earn a living by doing something honestly in exchange for money from somebody willing to buy or sell, and should keep the benefits of that transaction. The phrase “a peaceful life of one’s choosing” he presents as protecting privacy and broader natural rights that cannot all be specified, since listing every individual right would be an infinitely long list. Bob Zadek introduces the discussion by noting that “the fruits of one’s labors” is a phrase that preceded the founding of the country and exists in writing during the Enlightenment era, and states the concept as: people have a natural right, a property right, in the fruits of their labors, and money lawfully earned is theirs and cannot be taken without their consent.
Self-defense and the armed citizenry
David Harsanyi, asked why America has a relationship to guns that other first-world countries do not, traces it to the settlers and the natural right they already believed in when they came [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]]. He says self-defense is a liberal idea, small ‘l’ liberal, classical liberal, and that the people who came to the colonies brought that belief with them and never let it go. He argues the Revolution could not have happened without that right because there was an armed citizenry here, more armed than anywhere in the world, and that this won the country its freedom. He adds that when a person does not use their Fourth Amendment right or their Fifth Amendment right or even their First Amendment right, that does not mean the right itself is unimportant or should not be protected and nurtured. He also cites a dramatic drop in gun homicides over almost thirty years alongside a huge spike in gun ownership, and says the left does not understand that history.
Courts, legitimacy, and the security of rights
Bob Zadek frames the prospect of court packing through natural rights, asking Josh Blackman who will protect what he calls his natural rights and his rights in the Bill of Rights if popular will wishes there to be no protection, and describing a fear of the 51% treading on the rights of the 49% Eight-Dimensional Chess (2020). Blackman answers that the court is not the locomotive pulling the train but the caboose rounding it back: by the time the court stops protecting rights, society does not want to cherish those rights anymore, and it is too late, whether the court has its current form or a million members. His conclusion is that the way to protect rights is to persuade people of protecting them. He says free speech is on the wane and that the consensus on the court that free speech was important is starting to fragment. He also remarks that it is perverse that libertarians have to look to a President Trump to appoint judges who can preserve cherished rights, calling it a bizarre reversal that the party closer to protecting natural rights is that of the conservatives.
In the earlier episode on children and fear, Bob Zadek opens by describing the subject as making him embarrassed to be an American and distressed about the abrogation of civil liberties, which he calls the natural rights protected to us in the Constitution, and announces that the show will examine government exploitation of scare tactics and existential threats, manufactured or real, used to compromise liberty A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018). Lenore Skenazy, his guest, offers the formulation that she is not in favor of sex offenders or sex offenses but against the public registry.
Across episodes: no single development
The excerpts do not show a single developing argument across episodes but rather a term applied to different domains by different guests: Bhandari (2017) resists the extension of natural rights across cultures that Bob Zadek asserts, Nowrasteh (2019) supplies a Douglass-derived moral argument for the same right of movement, Harsanyi (2018) locates a natural right of self-defense in the settlers, Sandefur (2021) drafts the fruits of labor into constitutional text, and Blackman (2020) locates the security of rights in public persuasion rather than in the Court.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not supply a general theory of natural rights, any account of their origin or philosophical pedigree beyond scattered references to the Enlightenment era and to classical liberalism, or a definition of the term itself. They contain no discussion of how natural rights relate to enumerated constitutional rights as a matter of doctrine, and no case names or holdings on the question. Where an excerpt ends mid-sentence or mid-exchange, no further statement by that speaker is available.