Franklin D. Roosevelt appears in The Bob Zadek Show as a recurring reference point for the growth of federal power, treated across three episodes: a discussion of Supreme Court court packing, an interview on the 1933 American default, and a conversation on public choice theory. The excerpts do not offer a biography; they offer Roosevelt as an example invoked by guests and by the host.
Court packing and the 1937 attempt
In an episode on the concept of a legitimacy crisis, Bob Zadek asked guest Ilya Somin what the phrase court packing means and why it would become important in the 2020 Democratic primary and general election. Somin explained that the phrase is usually used to indicate expanding the size of the Supreme Court so as to change its ideological or political valence, noting a five-to-four conservative majority and Democratic arguments to expand the court to 11 or more. He identified the most prominent justification offered as what happened with Merrick Garland, and said that the fact of a debate within the Democratic Party, with several prominent Democrats favoring court packing, is itself significant How to Create a Legitimacy Crisis (2019).
Zadek placed the practice in a longer history, saying courts have been packed more or less since the John Adams presidency, and that Adams, bitter at losing the election to Thomas Jefferson, set about appointing as many justices as he could, with his Congress enacting legislation to create new district court judges. Zadek said the practice of leaving behind a legacy of appointments goes back to the founding and that there is nothing new about it. He then asked whether nine justices is the magic number, whether that number is provided for in the Constitution, and why nine and not 31.
Somin answered that there is nothing magical about nine, and that the whole reason court packing is possible is that the founding fathers, mistakenly in his view, did not fix the number of justices on the Supreme Court. He said the court can be expanded and packed so long as a majority of both houses of Congress and the presidency are aligned, that the Supreme Court was in fact packed in that way a number of times in the 19th century, and that over the last 150 years a pretty strong political norm arose against expanding the size of the Supreme Court. Roosevelt challenged that norm in 1937, Somin said, and even though he was in some ways the most popular and powerful president in American history up to that time, his effort was beaten back and failed How to Create a Legitimacy Crisis (2019).
The 1933 default
A later episode was devoted to what its framing calls the little-known history of the 1933 United States debt default under Roosevelt. Bob Zadek opened by describing it as part of the American ethos that the country has never and will never default on its obligations, an unblemished record across almost 240 years, and then said he had to destroy that view. He said that in a little-known but significant part of American history, Roosevelt, under the advice of one of the most significant economists you have never heard of, was able to default without defaulting on the debt. Zadek said Roosevelt caused a default, that it was strategic, and that by many observations the default engineered by Roosevelt and his advisors in 1933 may very well have been a brilliant economic and political move that may have shortened the Depression, at least postponed it, because it revived again in 1937, and gave Americans a significant respite from the evils of the Depression AMERICAN DEFAULT (2019).
Guest Sebastian Edwards, described by Zadek as teaching economics in the graduate program at UCLA and as having worked with Milton Friedman and other Chicago School free-market economists, explained how he came upon the story. About 15 years earlier, he said, he was asked by a law firm to work as an expert witness in cases related to the Argentine default of 2001. Preparing his report for the arbitration tribunal, he found one paragraph that said there was a precedent to what they had done, that the precedent is the United States in 1933, and that the Supreme Court said it was okay to do exactly what they were doing. Edwards said he started asking around and almost no one knew about it, which is when he decided to write a book on the subject AMERICAN DEFAULT (2019).
Zadek noted that it had not occurred to Edwards that the law firms had made the whole thing up to justify the Argentine default, and that he took it seriously, which was the right call, because he then discovered that Argentina was relying on the example set by the United States during the early stages of the Depression in 1933. The episode’s framing states that Edwards explains how Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard, confiscated private gold, and used a Supreme Court ruling on necessity to devalue the dollar and transfer wealth from creditors to debtors AMERICAN DEFAULT (2019).
Roosevelt and the accretion of state power
In an episode on public choice theory, Bob Zadek told guest Mike Munger that the Constitution says nothing about free markets, capitalism, or any economic system, but that it does say the government cannot interfere with private contracts and cannot pass a law to abridge a contract, which he called the sanctity of a contract and a property right. He said the Constitution as originally drafted gives the government enumerated powers, quaint today but that is the way it started in 1789, with the federal government able to do only limited governmental activities and very little in economics other than keep interstate commerce regular. He said the government, as Madison observed, had only limited powers, so there was no need to worry about free markets because the government was never given the power to mess with the markets in any event Mike Munger is Taking Public Choice Seriously (2019).
Zadek added that under public choice theory people who work in government are drawn to the fact that in government you are given lawful power over others, and that those in power, by human nature rather than venality, seek to acquire more of it, calling it a bit of an intoxicant. Munger said he did not think you have to go even there: many people go into government because there is something they want to accomplish, and if you care about the homeless, you are told you lack the power to do this really good thing. He said people who work for government often find the Constitution very frustrating because it says you lack the power to do the thing you care about, and that this is true of people on the left and the right. He agreed it is an intoxicant, but said it is also because you want to be able to accomplish things, and the problem is that if you have the power to do what you want, you have the power to do other things too. Once the scope of the power of the state is increased, he said, all of us are going to agree that we never meant that. Munger said this slow accretion over time of the powers of the state has resulted partly from an intoxicant but partly from a sense, since Roosevelt, since the 1930s and the Great Depression, that we have come to expect more from government, things the government cannot actually do: it cannot protect us from risk, cannot make sure everyone is employed, cannot make sure there are no hurricanes. He said we have the idea that we should increase the power of the government because it will be used for good, and that this is just not true Mike Munger is Taking Public Choice Seriously (2019).
Zadek responded that one characteristic he has found is that the Constitution becomes really inconvenient when you have that mindset, and that when people see the Constitution as an inconvenience, it scares the bejesus out of him.
Across episodes
The three episodes do not argue a single question about Roosevelt so much as invoke him at three different points on one theme. In the 2019-04-18 episode, Ilya Somin treats the 1937 court-packing effort as a failed challenge to a political norm that had held for roughly 150 years. In the 2019-05-07 episode, Sebastian Edwards treats the 1933 default as a successful and possibly beneficial exercise of executive power. In the 2019-11-03 episode, Mike Munger treats the Roosevelt era as the origin of a durable public expectation of government. The excerpts show no development between the treatments; each guest uses Roosevelt for a separate argument.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe Roosevelt’s early life, his governorship, his elections, the New Deal legislation by name, or his death. They do not state the name of any bill, the holding of any case beyond the general reference to a Supreme Court ruling on necessity, or which amendment any question turned on. The court-packing discussion does not name the plan or its congressional fate beyond Somin’s statement that the effort was beaten back and failed, and the default discussion breaks off before Edwards describes the mechanism in his own words.