ZadekpediaRonald Reagan appears in these episodes not as the subject of an episode but as a recurring reference point in arguments about drug policy, international trade, and the scope of government. The treatments differ sharply: Lucy Steigerwald assigns Reagan responsibility for the escalation of the war on drugs and the growth of the prison population, while Casey Mulligan describes a gap between Reagan’s free-trade rhetoric and his practice. Bob Zadek calls Reagan one of his heroes in American history and quotes his warning about government assistance.
The war on drugs and mass incarceration
In the 2015 episode with Lucy Steigerwald, Bob Zadek argues that the criminal justice system has been captured by the war on drugs, diverted from protecting the public to a political activity at great expense and compromise of safety Lucy Steigerwald on The Drug War and Private Prisons (2015). Steigerwald agrees and extends the point beyond drugs, saying there are serious issues with every facet of the criminal justice system. She states that the increase in the prison population began to explode three decades ago when Ronald Reagan, described as the supposed small-government friend, decided to escalate and militarize the war on drugs. She attributes the figure of 2.3 million people in prison and jails today, against something like 300,000 prison-wise three decades ago, to that escalation. In the same passage she identifies civil asset forfeiture as prioritizing drug crimes because seized cash, materials and cars can be sold for revenue, and mandatory minimums as keeping people in prison longer for drug and non-violent gun crimes.
Zadek responds that the situation is a disaster for everybody except the Corrections Corporation of America and the California Prison Guards Union. He later frames the war on drugs as having an ugly racial history and as probably having no foundation in the principles of federalism and constitutional law, and argues that it deprives millions of Americans of their liberty. He distinguishes malum per se acts, obviously bad in themselves, from malum prohibitum acts, bad because the government says so, and places the war on drugs in the second category, adding that in the history of man on earth drug use was never considered a bad act in any society until the early 20th century in the United States.
Steigerwald argues that mandatory minimums and general sentence inflation have warped people’s understanding of how serious prison is, and that non-violent offenders should be dealt with through restitution to victims rather than imprisonment, invoking the principle of no victim, no crime. Zadek endorses that principle as a core doctrine of libertarian thought and describes the purpose of government as protecting life, liberty and property.
Federalism and the Commerce Clause
Zadek raises a political science question about the temperance movement, noting that consumption of alcohol was never criminalized but manufacture and sale were, and that because the federal government was acknowledged to lack the power to do that, the 18th Amendment was required to give Congress the power. He asks why a constitutional amendment would not likewise be needed to give Congress power to criminalize drug use. He says Washington has used taxing statutes and the Commerce Clause, and that if anyone believes the founders envisioned that the power to regulate commerce among the states would result in a million mostly minority Americans being incarcerated, no one would sincerely believe that was intended. He calls it the hook by which so many Americans have had their lives ruined by Nixon’s war, the longest war in American history.
Steigerwald says the states are where progress is happening, citing people who got marijuana legalization on the ballot in Colorado in 2012 and legalization in Colorado and Washington state, and quoting John Stossel’s line that government gets in front of the parade and pretends to be leading it. Zadek says the federal government has no constitutional basis to criminalize drug use and calls the states’ pushback healthy for federalism.
Trade policy
In the 2020 episode with Casey Mulligan, Bob Zadek describes himself as pained by Trump identifying as the tariff man and by interference with the free market, and asks why American consumers should be taxed for choosing to buy foreign-made goods. He says he yearns for President Reagan and calls him one of his heroes in American history, but asks Mulligan to explain how his own views of Reagan’s approach to foreign trade might be misplaced You’re Hired! Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House (2020).
Mulligan says his book links to a Ronald Reagan video on the virtues of free international trade, which he calls awesome and says would bring tears to your eyes, and that Reagan can explain better than anyone, including Milton Friedman, why free international trade is good. But he says that is not what Reagan practiced, and that special interests in Washington get served, naming steel companies and car companies. He says Reagan used mainly a quota arrangement, telling Japanese car companies there was a limit on how many cars they could send, and that the Japanese companies loved it because they did not compete with each other for space in the market. He reports that after he wrote the chapter and sent it to Reagan people, they confirmed Japanese companies would come to the White House during the Reagan years and ask for a quota. He says the American car companies loved it, the American consumer paid more, and the money went to the Japanese and American companies. Trump, by contrast, did very few quotas and used tariffs, so the money went to the Treasury rather than to Chinese companies, which Mulligan calls an improvement. He notes Milton Friedman wrote in the Wall Street Journal in the ’80s that Reagan was so bad with quotas that a tariff man would be an improvement.
Mulligan also describes an intellectual property problem in Reagan’s day, with the Japanese and other East Asian tigers not respecting American copyrights and other intellectual property, and says Reagan threatened tariffs and eventually in his second term got trade deals with Japan and Asian tigers to respect those rights. He says the same issue now is called China, and that while some Chicago-trained economists in the Reagan years recommended tariffs to change such behavior, no economist recommends that now.
Across episodes
Reagan is invoked in four episodes, but the episodes show no development of a single question across them: Steigerwald’s 2015 indictment of his drug-war escalation, Zadek’s 2020 quotation of his warning about government help in the gig-economy episode, Mulligan’s 2020 account of his trade quotas, and Peter Wallison’s book title in the 2020 election episode are separate uses rather than a continuing argument Terrible New Worker “Protection” Laws Threaten the Gig Economy (2020) Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020).