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Cato Institute

11 min read

The Cato Institute is a libertarian organization whose fellows, officers, and board members appear repeatedly as guests on The Bob Zadek Show. Across the episodes in these excerpts, Cato serves both as an institutional affiliation for individual guests and, in one episode, as the explicit subject of the host’s gratitude and personal testimony.

Institutional identity and personnel

Bob Zadek introduces Tom G. Palmer as a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, a director at Cato University, and executive vice president for international programs at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which he describes as a non-profit, non-partisan organization that takes no political positions and was created to promote free-market capitalism around the world The Morality of Capitalism (2012).

John Allison is described as former CEO of BB&T who left the chairmanship of that bank to join the Cato Institute as its leader; Zadek says the bank was, in his belief, the tenth largest in America John Allison on the Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure (2015).

Alex Nowrasteh is introduced as an immigration policy specialist with the Cato Institute, and as one of Zadek’s very first guests, perhaps nine years before the 2016 broadcast, and a frequent commentator on the show since Alex Nowrasteh: How Prop. 187 Turned California Blue (2016).

John Glaser is identified as Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, researching grand strategy, defense, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, and the rise of China; Zadek notes his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from UMass Amherst and study at George Mason University Rethinking Pax Americana with John Glaser (2017).

David Boaz is introduced as Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute and author of Libertarianism: A Primer and The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom David Boaz on the Libertarian Ethos (2018).

Michael Tanner is described as a Cato Institute Senior Fellow who has written on domestic policy including poverty, social welfare, healthcare, and Social Security, and as author of Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Leviathan on the Right: How Big Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution, Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It, and The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America’s Poor Libertarian Anti-Poverty Policy (2019).

Bob Levy is introduced as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Cato Institute, with his name found at the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies; Zadek says Levy joined Cato a number of years ago after becoming an attorney, preceded by a successful life in business A Libertarian Legal Perspective on Vaccine Mandates (2021).

Ilya Shapiro appears as the guest for a discussion of Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court, in an episode whose topics list includes the Cato Institute Judge Gorsuch on the Hot Seat (2017).

The host’s account

In the 2018 episode, Zadek departs from his usual practice of introducing a guest’s credentials and speaks about the institute itself. He calls the Cato Institute one of the most important organizations in his life and, whether listeners know it or not, in theirs. He says he found the organization about 25 years earlier, when he was finding his roots and beginning to understand how he felt about his relationship to others and to the world. He describes it as founded back in the 70s, adding that David Boaz would correct him if he were off by the date, and calls it the pillar of strong libertarian scholarship and public policy doctrine, an absolute bright light and a lodestar leading himself and millions of other people toward a healthy understanding of their relationship to their fellow man, their government, and the world. He thanks the institute and its representative, and says he could not imagine a world without the Cato Institute there to help all of us understand what is going on around us David Boaz on the Libertarian Ethos (2018).

Policy work cited on air

Zadek’s introduction of John Glaser rests on a Cato publication. He describes reading a policy analysis published by Cato on withdrawing from overseas bases, which he characterizes as a scholarly piece examining the wisdom and value of the U.S. maintaining an empire around the world of staffed and well-funded military bases. He says the piece was written by that morning’s guest, that after putting it down he concluded Glaser was right and none of it made any sense whatever, and that he could not remember seeing even one piece examining the wisdom of this expensive and dangerous tactical or strategic decision Rethinking Pax Americana with John Glaser (2017).

At the close of that episode, Glaser tells listeners they can go to cato.org, click on “Experts,” and find him on that page, and can follow him on Twitter at @JWCGlaser Rethinking Pax Americana with John Glaser (2017).

Across episodes

Cato recurs across the excerpts from 2012 to 2021, but the treatment does not develop: in every episode but one the institute appears only as the affiliation in a guest introduction, and the exception — Zadek’s 2018 tribute — is a statement of personal gratitude rather than a claim about the organization’s history or positions. Palmer, Allison, Nowrasteh, Glaser, Boaz, Tanner, and Levy each carry the affiliation into a different policy domain, and no excerpt shows one guest commenting on another’s Cato work or on the institute’s internal debates.

What the sources do not cover

The excerpts do not state the Cato Institute’s founding date, its location, its funding, its legal structure, or its formal mission statement; Zadek’s “back in the 70s” is offered with his own caveat that Boaz would correct him. No excerpt describes the institute’s internal governance beyond naming Levy as chairman of the board and Boaz as executive vice president. No guest criticizes Cato or defends it against criticism, and no excerpt reports a Cato position taken independently of a guest’s own argument.

Guests and episodes

57 appearances by 35 guests, 2009–2023.

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