The democratic process as a vector for organized interests
In the episode on privatization, Bob Zadek frames the democratic process as the mechanism by which an involuntary wealth transfer from taxpayers to city and county workers is sustained. He calls the workers overpaid because private business would perform the same function for less, and asks why taxpayers are so sheep-like and not enraged at being compelled by taxation to subsidize that. He attributes the politics to unions that amass a potent political force and give money to elected officials so they can preserve their own jobs, calling it patently dishonest and a terrible abuse of the system Fire All Government Workers (2011).
Adrian Moore supplies the mechanism. He notes that in the market there is no democracy: you vote with your feet by going to another business, whereas in government it is a democratic process. In that process, he says, the idea of taking a little bit of money from a lot of people who are too busy to care, and giving it to a few people for whom it is a lot of money, is the backbone of the public service system in the United States. Those few people have tremendous influence with elected officials because they attend every city council meeting in mass, while an infinitesimal fraction of ordinary citizens go to city council or county board of supervisors meetings even occasionally. He estimates that 30 or 40 percent of people bother to vote once in a while, and that 99 percent of listeners have never been to a city council meeting Fire All Government Workers (2011).
Moore also draws a distinction within government pay: the private sector pays skilled workers more than government does but pays unskilled workers much less, so government ends up providing unskilled workers with much too high pay. Zadek closes the segment with the observation that government as employer always pays with OPM, other people’s money, and that it is easy to be generous with other people’s money Fire All Government Workers (2011).
Democratic procedure as a constraint on infrastructure timelines
Mark Joffe, discussing the Green New Deal and California high-speed rail, treats the democratic process as a procedural requirement that consumes time. He notes that the High-Speed Rail Authority was set up in 1996 to develop the plan, that the plan was finally put on the ballot in 2008, and that service was envisioned starting in 2033 along the Los Angeles to San Francisco corridor — a total period of 37 years from project conception to project implementation. Against the Green New Deal’s framing of a systemic threat that has to be solved by 2030, he says it seems very unlikely that high-speed rail will achieve the objective of saving humanity from climate change given the length of time it takes to plan and implement these systems Not Enough Bricks (2019).
Joffe then contrasts the China example. Advocates ask why China built out an enormous amount of high-speed rail within the last decade. He cites two considerations: shoddy construction practices that have resulted in casualties, and weak property rights in China, which make condemning the land necessary to build the rail very simple. He says he does not think most people, including most progressives and moderate Democrats, want to see average people losing their houses willy-nilly, and that they would hope there would be a democratic process by which we all agreed where the least impactful route would be, people would be properly compensated, and that would take some number of years to adjudicate. If we are going to have a democratic process and rely on individual rights, he concludes, it is very hard to imagine laying a national network of high-speed rail and getting it operational by 2030 Not Enough Bricks (2019).
Charlie Dice presses the point, asking whether the idea is a cover for seizing power. Joffe declines to attribute bad intentions generally: he imagines some people have that framework, but believes a lot of progressives sincerely believe anthropogenic global warming is a serious problem requiring immediate government action. His criticism is instead of central control by people who are not keeping up with the latest technology, which shoehorns a possibly wrong solution onto society, whereas the market is a great laboratory for experimenting with different ideas Not Enough Bricks (2019).
Cost, lives, and decisions made in the dark
In the lockdown episode, Zadek poses a hypothetical to frame the democratic process as a place where a price on human life is set. Assuming a disease could be cured and lives saved by raising the income tax rate to 80 percent for five years, he asks listeners whether they would vote for or against it. Voting against, he says, means saying that saving a life does have a value and that the cost is simply too expensive. He calls this a decision we make frequently in our political life, and notes that at the national level and in New York, California, and most other but not all other states, the needs of economic life have been subordinated to saving lives in some amount we do not even know How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020).
Jacob Sullum agrees that politicians are making these decisions in the dark because they lack crucial information, and argues that you have to give some weight to the cost of the policy when you do not know the benefit. He says resources are finite and money used for one thing cannot be used for another; that people accept risk every time they get in a car; and that one way regulators calculate the value per life saved is by looking at how people actually behave, such as the wage premium demanded for a relatively hazardous job. From this he concludes there is not an infinite value to every life, even to your own, and that the same principle ought to apply in the pandemic even though there is tremendous uncertainty on both sides — about the death toll and about long-term economic effects, including millions out of work and government checks and loans making the debt bigger How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020).
Returning a question to the democratic process
Two episodes from July 2022 carry nearly identical exchanges between Zadek and Clark Neily on abortion after Dobbs. Zadek says the Supreme Court offered no opinion on abortion, the criminalization or non-criminalization of it, but made a constitutional determination that the Constitution has nothing to say about it, telling elected officials at the state level to make their decision. Although many politicians complained it was the end of democracy or a usurpation of the will of the people, he calls it the profound, emphatic opposite: giving the decision back to the people and recognizing it as the province of the democratic process, not the province of the judiciary. From a small-d democratic standpoint, he says, it could not have been healthier Judicial Round-Up with Clark Neily (2022) Dobbs, the Democratization of Rights, and the Disaster of Qualified Immunity (2022).
Neily’s short answer is that states are basically free to set their own abortion policy, but he is not so sure. He notes that even the two dissenting justices in Roe v. Wade said a law making no exception to save the life of the mother would be unconstitutional, and asks what happens if a state after Dobbs made no such exception — we do not know. He raises whether a state may make an exception for rape or incest, observing that some states allow it and others do not, and that if this is human life the rationale for the unenumerated right is that it involves another human life, which makes the exception question challenging. He also asks whether a state could authorize abortion up to eight months and 29 days, and whether courts would stand by and say nothing to do with us. He concludes that states will not have complete free rein, that Dobbs leaves really difficult questions unanswered, and that this will not be the last abortion case to come before the courts Judicial Round-Up with Clark Neily (2022) Dobbs, the Democratization of Rights, and the Disaster of Qualified Immunity (2022).
Across episodes
The topic recurs across all five episodes, but the excerpts show no single developing argument. The 2011 privatization episode and the 2019 rail episode both treat the democratic process as a mechanism whose outputs are shaped by who participates and how long procedure takes, with Moore supplying the public-choice mechanism and Joffe the property-rights and timeline constraint. The 2020 lockdown episode shifts to the substance of the decisions the process makes, with Zadek posing the tax-rate hypothetical and Sullum arguing that costs must be weighed under uncertainty. The two 2022 episodes repeat the same Zadek-Neily exchange on Dobbs, with Zadek calling the return of abortion policy to the states healthy from a small-d standpoint and Neily cataloguing the questions Dobbs leaves open.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the names of the statutes or ballot measures involved in the California high-speed rail timeline, nor the state in which any city or county discussed by Moore is located. They do not give the title or field of any speaker beyond what the labels show, and they do not state what Roe v. Wade or Dobbs held beyond the fragments quoted here. Several sections break off mid-exchange, and nothing in the excerpts describes how any of these questions was resolved.