ZadekpediaNo speaker in these episodes names the SEC, describes its statutory authority, or evaluates its enforcement record. What follows therefore records the adjacent material the episodes do supply — chiefly the Social Security trust fund, criminal libel, and the Second Amendment — and notes where the sources stop.
Social Security and the trust fund
In the 2014 episode, Bob Zadek introduces Burt Abrams, described as an economics professor at the University of Delaware and author of The Terrible 10: A Century of Economic Folly, to discuss Social Security as one of the ten worst economic mistakes of the twentieth century Worst Ten Economic Mistakes of the 20th Century (2014). Abrams calls Social Security a major redistribution program whose scale few people understand, and Zadek frames it as taking property from one person because someone in power decided another deserves it more. Abrams adds that Social Security taxes were initially intended to go into a savings fund that would lead to lending and capital building, but instead went to the first retirees.
Abrams offers the case of Ida Fuller, the first person to receive a Social Security check, who paid about $21 in Social Security taxes and collected over $20,000 over her lifetime. He attributes her generous benefit to the trust fund being robbed, and says the early retirees all thought the system was great because it was for them. Zadek observes that this had many attributes of a Ponzi scheme — the first people out made all the money — while noting Abrams’s book does not call it one.
Abrams gives a numerical example of a two-person family with one income earner retiring in 2011, whose average wage salary would have been $43,500. That family paid into Social Security and Medicare some $360,000 in taxes, computed at a real interest rate of 2%, so at retirement they would have had $359,000 in a retirement account. Abrams says the couple can expect over $800,000 in Social Security and medical benefits — about $450,000 in excess of what they saved. He states that money was never saved and must come out of current taxes, and that it will come from other potential retirees or savers who will lose money.
Zadek asks why there is no countervailing political force, imagining an American Association of Working Persons to oppose the AARP, and attributes the imbalance to the doctrine of concentrated benefit and dispersed cost. Abrams replies that 63 million people currently receive Social Security benefits, with perhaps 20 or 30 million more near retirement, and predicts some needs-based revision or means-testing, which he calls a disincentive to save privately.
Criminal libel and prosecutorial discretion
In the 2021 episode, Eugene Volokh argues against a well-drafted criminal libel statute on two grounds Criminal Memes: The Ballad of Ricky Vaughn (2021). First, it gives prosecutors the opportunity to go after people who may not be lying but whom the prosecutor thinks are lying, or simply wants to claim are lying — including a political enemy running against an ally of the prosecutor. Second, libels are so numerous that any such law would be sharply underenforced, making enforcement turn on whether the prosecutor likes the victim and dislikes the alleged libeler.
Volokh suggests one narrower design: limit a criminal libel statute to statements on matters of purely private concern, leaving public matters to civil liability. He notes the legal system has not done a good job delineating public from private, and gives the example of a patient posting a review saying a doctor overcharged him and he had to return three times to correct problems caused by bad treatment. Zadek observes that Volokh’s examples were mostly politically motivated, and that libel is broader — citing the MeToo movement and college campuses — where a prosecutor’s motive might be less suspect.
Zadek argues that prosecutorial discretion problems are inherent to criminal law, not particular to speech. Volokh agrees this is a great argument and may be right, placing himself in the middle among law professors: most say criminal libel is ridiculous, and basically no one says to bring it back. Zadek adds that speech is protected by the First Amendment, and that every criminal statute with incarceration deprives someone of a constitutionally protected right.
The Second Amendment
In the 2018 episode, Zadek reads the Second Amendment as one sentence with three commas and argues the gun control debate would proceed irrespective of its wording, because those who favor gun control do not do so because of the amendment’s text Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018). David Harsanyi agrees there is a component trying to revise history for the contemporary debate, calls the amendment not particularly well-written, and says it was a long edited process. He states there is not a single quote from a single founder contending that owning a weapon is not an individual right, and that the only debate between Federalists and anti-Federalists was who would control the militias. He adds that the Minutemen did not hand back their weapons after Concord and Lexington, that militias existed because of individuals rather than the reverse, and that most of the 13 colonies had something similar in their own constitutions that was clearer about it being an individual right.
Across episodes
The episodes show no development on the SEC across episodes; the topic is not named in any of them. The 2014 episode treats Social Security’s trust fund and redistribution, the 2018 episode treats the Second Amendment’s individual-rights history, and the 2021 episode treats criminal libel and prosecutorial discretion — three separate subjects with no shared argument advanced by any speaker.