Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine and the author of two books, Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use and For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health. He appeared as a guest on The Bob Zadek Show in episodes on hate crimes legislation and on the COVID-19 pandemic. Host Bob Zadek introduced him as his go-to person on the coronavirus and public health topics How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020).
Hate crimes legislation
In a 2009 episode devoted to hate crimes legislation, Sullum and Zadek examined the Matthew Shepard Act. Zadek argued that the Act had no findings showing that federalizing a state-level crime was needed, calling it pandering to the gay community, and warned that Congress could repeatedly offer enhanced penalties to voting blocs Hate Crimes Legislation (2009). Sullum described a competition between groups over inclusion: the legislation was attached in the Senate to a military funding bill, and Republicans introduced an amendment to add service members to the categories receiving extra punishment for attacks. He said it was not a healthy situation where people compete to have more than equality under the law, and that the seriousness with which a case is taken should not hinge on group membership.
Sullum rejected the inference that the laws go unused. He said people do receive more severe penalties, in some cases twice as severe, based on their beliefs, and that the same crime with the same harm could draw twice the prison time if done for anti-Semitic reasons. Zadek added the qualifier of perceived reasons, and Sullum cited a California case he had written about in which a perpetrator who thought his victims were Jewish triggered the hate crime statute even though they were not.
Zadek raised the Child Protection and Safety Act, which he said allows civil commitment of federal prisoners deemed sexually dangerous, comparing it to examining thoughts and locking people up for bad thoughts. Sullum noted the law had already passed and described it as preventive detention for people who had completed their sentences, kept indefinitely because of crimes they might commit in the future. He said many states already did this and the Supreme Court had said it was acceptable because it was treatment rather than imprisonment, and that the federal government had now passed a similar law despite having no particular authority over sex-related crimes.
A caller from San Francisco, Al, who identified himself as a black male, distinguished the Reconstruction era, when there were routine and organized assaults against blacks and governors and sheriffs violated the 14th Amendment, from the Matthew Shepard Act, which he opposed because there was no comparable organized effort against homosexuals. Zadek agreed that during Reconstruction there was a profound need for federal intervention, but asked where the data showed a need today; Al agreed. Sullum said that if there were evidence that state and local officials routinely ignored crimes against homosexuals, there would be an argument, but he saw no such evidence and nobody citing it. In the Matthew Shepard case itself, local and state authorities almost immediately caught, convicted and imprisoned the perpetrators. Zadek observed that Wyoming was the only state without hate crimes legislation of any type; Sullum said it was one of a handful, and that since life in prison and possibly the death penalty were available, there was no function for hate crime legislation in that case.
Sullum also raised the possibility that including groups in such legislation could stir up more hatred by creating the perception that those groups get special treatment above others, though he allowed that this was hypothetical and unsupported by evidence. Zadek cited a finding, based on spotty data, that two-thirds of hate crimes were committed by people whose primary motive was thrill-seeking, and said the thrill would probably be enhanced as the stakes went up, so there was no data supporting deterrence. Sullum said that once certain groups have special protection, groups left out naturally want it too, because otherwise they feel crimes against them are taken less seriously. Zadek closed by imagining a federal law enhancing penalties for violent crime against anybody except lawyers.
COVID-19 and lockdowns
In a 2020 episode, Sullum told Zadek that the most important unknown was how deadly the virus is — what percentage of infected people can be expected to die. He said it was clear the virus is more deadly than the seasonal flu, whose case fatality rate is about 0.1%, and that U.S. public health officials put the COVID-19 rate between 0.1% and 1%, a huge range reflecting poor data collection. Some epidemiologists, he said, think the lower end is less than 0.1% and might be as low as 0.05%, which would make COVID-19 less deadly than the seasonal flu. Depending on which rate is used, projected deaths vary widely: the CDC foresaw 1.7 million deaths in the U.S., and a group at Imperial College headed by Neil Ferguson projected 2.2 million.
Sullum called those scenarios implausible for two reasons. They assumed relatively high case fatality rates — 0.8% for the CDC and 0.9% for the Imperial College group — and they assumed high infection percentages, with the CDC assuming 65% in its worst-case scenario on the premise that nothing effective is done. He said that assumption did not adequately account for voluntary changes in behavior, such as reducing social contact, limiting errands and washing hands frequently, which are bound to affect transmission. He summarized the range of U.S. death estimates as a few thousand to maybe 20,000, up to the CDC’s worst-case 1.7 million, and said that with such uncertainty you cannot know whether what you are doing is worth the cost.
Sullum described the costs of shutdowns as enormous: people out of work, businesses no longer operating, possible bankruptcy, and a severe recession as bad as 2008–2009 or worse. He said that recession cost an estimated $22 trillion, and that while some of the effect would have happened anyway in response to the virus, a lot was government-mandated. He called it a mistake to say, as Andrew Cuomo does, that we will do whatever it takes for as long as it takes, no matter the cost, because if the cost is huge and the benefit is small, those measures should not be undertaken. Policy, he said, must weigh not only lives possibly saved but the cost of the measures.
Across episodes
The two episodes are eleven years apart and address different subjects — hate crimes legislation in 2009 and COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 — and the excerpts show no development of a shared argument between them. Both episodes feature Sullum as the guest and Zadek as host, and in both Sullum questions whether government action rests on adequate evidence of need.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Sullum’s age, birthplace, education, or the date he joined Reason. They do not describe the contents of his books beyond their titles, nor his other broadcast appearances. The 2020 excerpt breaks off mid-sentence in a section on the problem with the denominator, so the remainder of that discussion is not available. No excerpt states the outcome of any vote on the Matthew Shepard Act or the name of the military funding bill to which it was attached.
Episodes
2 appearances, 2009–2020.
- Hate Crimes Legislation (2009) — Critique of Hate Crimes Legislation and Federalism. Senior Editor at Reason Magazine
- How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020) — COVID-19 mortality rates and public policy challenges. Senior Editor, Reason magazine