The Drug Enforcement Administration does not figure in the excerpts of The Bob Zadek Show gathered for this article. The three episodes cited below address, respectively, state automobile-franchise laws and Tesla Motors, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy as a technique for living under a state that one does not control, and the transformation of Title IX enforcement through “Dear Colleague” letters. None of them names the DEA, describes its functions, or evaluates its conduct. What follows therefore records what the excerpts do contain, and notes at the end what they leave uncovered.
Tesla Motors and state franchise law
The earliest of the three episodes takes up the economics of how automobiles are sold. Bob Zadek described the franchise system that the original General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and the forty or fifty other car companies that have since been absorbed or fallen by the wayside established, under which a local business operator received a franchise to sell a manufacturer’s cars within a geographic area. Those franchisees, he said, accumulated political power because they were large collectors of sales tax, sponsors of the Little League and other civic activities, and significant employers, and they persuaded state legislatures to enact laws protecting them from the manufacturers. Under those laws, Zadek said, a manufacturer cannot terminate a franchise because it makes no economic sense, cannot terminate for anything other than cause, and cannot terminate even when the contract expires, so that a franchise can be passed to the owner’s children as part of an estate. He put the cost of the resulting middleman at about $1,800 added to the price of a car, or roughly $25 billion a year. Worst Ten Economic Mistakes of the 20th Century (2014)
Zadek framed Tesla Motors as a startup automobile company manufacturing in Northern California, whose first model was a two-seater roadster priced over $100,000 and whose more recent sedan fell in the range of $70,000 or $80,000. Tesla, he said, wanted to follow the Apple model — selling directly through its own stores, with employees who are not paid on commission and are trained to educate rather than to sell — and was running into litigation as auto dealers and manufacturers sought to use what he called crony capitalism to prevent it. He noted that Tesla litigates state by state because the franchise laws are state by state, somewhat but not always uniform, and that where direct selling is barred the company has set up mall stores where an employee explains the car and then leads the customer to a computer terminal to buy online. Worst Ten Economic Mistakes of the 20th Century (2014)
The episode included a clip of an auto dealer representative arguing that the state laws and extra costs are necessary to protect dealers’ investment in their business and in their people, and a clip of Elon Musk, identified by Zadek as the founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, saying that Tesla trains people to educate rather than to sell, that legislators voting against an overwhelming public interest is a perversion of democracy, and that the car dealers are such huge contributors to political campaigns at the local level. Zadek’s own commentary was harsher: he called General Motors, which he said was seeking to require Tesla to sell through franchisees, cowards running to government for help, and he invoked creative destruction to argue that government should not protect a dying or outmoded economic model. He also described a New Jersey episode in which Tesla’s temporary license to sell at a mall came up for renewal and the Motor Vehicle Department shut the store down after dealers pressured Governor Christie, a matter he said was then in the courts in New Jersey. Worst Ten Economic Mistakes of the 20th Century (2014)
REBT and living under a state one does not control
A later episode featured Dr. Michael Edelstein, who described his practice of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, which he said was devised by Albert Ellis many years ago. The main idea, in Edelstein’s account, is that it is not a dysfunctional childhood, crazy parents, or an unpleasant job that forces a person to feel anxious, depressed, angry, or to procrastinate or become addicted, but rather what is in one’s head — one’s thinking, ideas, values, beliefs, attitudes and opinions, what one tells oneself when one becomes emotionally disturbed. He called this a powerful idea because if one’s own thinking causes the disturbance, one can change that thinking, whereas one cannot go back in a time machine and change one’s childhood. How to Stay Sane in a Statist World (2017)
The excerpt breaks off as Charlie Deist asks Edelstein what the work looks like with patients — how he goes about identifying areas where people might have distorted thought patterns. The excerpt does not continue past that question, and it contains no discussion of the DEA or of drug policy. How to Stay Sane in a Statist World (2017)
Title IX and the “Dear Colleague” letter
The third episode concerns the transformation of Title IX enforcement, with R. Shep Melnick as guest. Zadek opened the excerpt by asking why the criminal statutes are not sufficient, and why, if they are not, the cure is not for states to conform their criminal statutes to societal norms; he asked what is special about the educational environment that requires a student to behave above the level of mere criminality. Melnick answered by distinguishing what schools might want to do from what they should be federally mandated to do, saying it is entirely reasonable for a school to set standards — he gave Brigham Young University’s rule against sex outside marriage and his own institution’s unenforced rule against sex outside marriage on campus — and that the question is whether such norms should be federally mandated the same for all universities or left to institutional discretion. He said the Obama administration tried to establish very detailed rules about acceptable behavior and seriously overreached. Title IX’s Transformation: R. Shep Melnick on the New Civil Rights Debate (2018)
Zadek observed that Melnick, though he had said he is not a libertarian, sounded like one, and argued that the strength of American higher education is its diversity, that universities should establish a variety of standards, and that a vibrant market for choosing universities exists. Melnick replied that he was not sure Oberlin would survive but was sure BYU would. Title IX’s Transformation: R. Shep Melnick on the New Civil Rights Debate (2018)
The bulk of the excerpt is Melnick’s explanation of the “Dear Colleague” letter. One form of rulemaking authorized by statute, he said, is to issue a rule under the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires a proposal, publication, a comment period, an explanation of what was done, and judicial review. In recent decades, he said, the Office for Civil Rights has mostly not used that route at all, instead issuing a unilateral letter to all colleges, universities, and primary and secondary schools receiving federal funds, stating how it interprets the statute and what recipients are required to do. He noted that the letters invite comments after the rule has been issued, the opposite of what it should be, that the Office for Civil Rights considers them legally binding so that noncompliance exposes a school to enforcement action, and that courts have frequently deferred to them. Such letters, he said, can run ten, twenty, thirty or forty pages, especially when combined with documents called Questions and Answers, and amount to an evasion of the Administrative Procedure Act. He found it remarkable that the letters say nothing new is in them while the White House called the 2011 letter a pathbreaking policy. Title IX’s Transformation: R. Shep Melnick on the New Civil Rights Debate (2018)
Zadek characterized the “Dear Colleague” letter as an interoffice communication in which the sender shares its reading of a statute while being the paying agent that approves the recipient’s checks, so that the implied threat makes it a “your money or your life” letter. He added that the author of such a letter has no statutory authority to share its views if those views vary from the statute itself. Title IX’s Transformation: R. Shep Melnick on the New Civil Rights Debate (2018)
Across episodes
The three episodes touch on unrelated topics — automobile franchising, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, and Title IX enforcement — and the excerpts show no development of any single question across them; the only recurring theme is a shared skepticism toward state and federal regulation, expressed by Zadek in the Tesla and Title IX episodes and by Edelstein only in the narrower sense of managing one’s own emotional response to circumstance. Worst Ten Economic Mistakes of the 20th Century (2014) How to Stay Sane in a Statist World (2017) Title IX’s Transformation: R. Shep Melnick on the New Civil Rights Debate (2018)
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not name the Drug Enforcement Administration, describe its creation, structure, budget, or personnel, or discuss any drug case, statute, or enforcement action. They contain no assessment of the agency by Bob Zadek or by any guest, and no argument for or against its continued existence. Nothing in the material supports a statement about the DEA’s history, its relationship to state and local law enforcement, or its treatment in libertarian thought. An article on the DEA cannot be written from these sources.