In the excerpts from The Bob Zadek Show, individual freedom is presented as the organizing principle of libertarian philosophy. Host Bob Zadek defines Libertarianism as a point of view for examining and testing the relationship of citizens and their government, and says that at its core it focuses on the preservation of individual freedom, private property, and the right to live one’s life as one wishes, so long as in doing so one does not cause harm to the person or property of someone else We Are All Libertarians (2013). Zadek frames this as a philosophy rather than a party project: he says he does not aspire for the Libertarian Party to become a dominant political party, because third parties are never very successful in the United States and the deck is stacked against them. Instead he invites listeners to look at important issues through a libertarian lens, and argues that as Democrats and Republicans struggle to find common ground, the common ground they reach is inevitably the libertarian approach.
Freedom and its burdens
A second episode treats individual freedom less as an aspiration than as a weight. Zadek tells guest Dr. Michael Edelstein that they are discussing the confluence of two ways of approaching the world: the importance of individual freedom and, of greater importance, the burdens that individual freedom places upon all of us How to Stay Sane in a Statist World (2017). He reports on a visit to Eastern Europe where he discovered that many citizens who had spent much of their lives under communism found the greater-freedom life not to their liking, troubled and burdened by the importance of running their own lives. Zadek describes the second part of what he calls the freedom equation: no government means somebody else will have to take charge, and it is going to be us. He says members of our society even today find that disconcerting, troubling, and perhaps pretty scary. He then asks Edelstein, whom he describes as having been a libertarian with those beliefs for quite some time, about the relationship between how he embraced libertarianism and how he formulated his approach to psychology, borrowing the phrase “the libertarian mind” from David Boaz.
Freedom, poverty and local knowledge
In a 2020 episode, individual freedom appears as a goal of economic development. Guest Matt Warner, described by Zadek as President of the Atlas Network, says the think tanks his organization serves are nonprofit institutions independent of government that look at policy solutions to increase economic freedom and individual freedom towards human flourishing How to leverage resources within the liberty movement (2020). Warner says the number of think tanks around the world that fit that mold is around 500 and in more than 90 countries, and that Atlas Network supports locally led think tanks independent of government and independent from Atlas itself as the key answer to achieving economic and individual freedom reforms that lead to human flourishing. He describes the organization’s model as grant-making, training on think tank excellence and policy reform ideas, and providing a network of peers.
Warner also describes what he calls the “outsider’s dilemma”: how do we know that our ideas are the answer for someone else, and how do we solve an economic problem for someone else. He says the nature of economic development, human dignity and individual freedom means there are limitations to what we can do to solve other people’s problems. As an example he describes a project in Uganda in which $300,000 was spent to give a local village of 7,000 farmers money to switch from banana crops to corn crops, on the advice of researchers from Columbia University; the village increased its yield, but there was no one to sell the extra crop to and nowhere to store it, rats infested the village, and the farmers no longer had the banana crop they understood. Warner says the United States currently spends close to $50 billion a year in foreign aid, mostly through USAID, the State Department and the Defense Department, and that the UN has established a suggested target that donor countries give 0.7% of GDP, a threshold mostly Scandinavians cross. Zadek characterizes the Atlas Network model as global federalism, invoking Justice Brandeis’s description of states as laboratories of innovation.
Freedom, work and the future of cities
A June 2020 episode on the future of cities raises individual freedom in the psychology of remote work. Zadek, noting that libertarianism and individual freedom and responsibility are never far from the topic of the day, asks guest Brent Orrell whether working from home gives an employee a sense of independence — whether the worker becomes, in a way, more of an entrepreneur and less of an employee, dictating when they work and controlling their environment, and whether that is healthy for employer and employee alike The Future of Cities (2020). Orrell replies that he is of two minds: at one level Zadek is probably right, and he notes stories from the lockdowns of court proceedings conducted virtually, with judges irked that attorneys were sometimes lying in bed or not fully dressed. At another level Orrell calls it problematic, returning to his point that cities are social and that human beings require other human beings in order to become fully human. Zadek presses the question of why humans cannot get their social life from where they live rather than from work, and the excerpt breaks for a commercial before Orrell’s answer.
Earlier in the same conversation, Orrell speculates about the next two to five years for cities: reconfiguring urban life to make it safer, with more distance and fewer people in cities, less economic activity for businesses surrounding corporate headquarters, lower employment for people dependent on secondary job effects, and pressure on the city of New York’s tax base. He cites New York City’s $85 billion budget, about $10 billion of which he says is commercial real estate taxes a year, and suggests that losing perhaps a third of that would put pressure on city services including schools, libraries, police forces and fire.
Across episodes
The topic recurs across all four episodes, but the excerpts do not show a development in the treatment: Zadek states the core definition of individual freedom in 2013, describes its psychological burdens in 2017, and in 2020 applies it to development and to remote work, while the guests — Judge Jim Gray, Dr. Michael Edelstein, Matt Warner and Brent Orrell — each take up a different domain rather than revising the concept.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state what case or amendment any legal question turned on, nor do they name the bill, statute or founding document behind the principles discussed. The Edelstein conversation is represented only by Zadek’s framing question, and the Orrell conversation breaks off before the guest answers Zadek’s question about separating social life from work life. The excerpts also do not describe the internal content of Edelstein’s psychology or the Burundi case study that the Warner episode advertises.