“Laboratories of innovation” is the phrase Bob Zadek and his guests use for Justice Brandeis’s description of the states under American federalism — jurisdictions that experiment with policy so that the rest of the country can observe what succeeds and what fails. On The Bob Zadek Show the phrase recurs as a compact argument for decentralization: education, welfare, health care and tax policy are said to belong to the states, and the states are said to be improved by competing with one another. A Better America (2010)
Brandeis and the federalist idea
Zadek attributes the phrase to Justice Brandeis, whom he calls “Chief Justice Brandeis” in one episode and “Justice Supreme Court Justice Brandeis” in another, and he treats it as the core principle of federalism. In the 2013 episode on tax migration he quotes Brandeis directly: a state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country. Zadek’s gloss is that fifty states experimenting with the right combination of taxation and benefits will be judged by whether taxpayers move in or out, whereas a single federal experiment leaves dissenting citizens only the far more drastic option of moving to another country. Where is Everyone Going? (2013)
Gary Johnson, appearing twice, uses the phrase as a policy instrument rather than a description. Returning education to the states would produce “50 laboratories of innovation,” he says, because states are competitive and competition drives improvement. A Better America (2010) Two years later he applies the same formula to Medicaid and Medicare: block-grant a fixed sum to the states, remove the strings and mandates, and leave it to “50 laboratories of innovation and best practice” to make the money work. The Triumph of Principle Over Politics (2012)
Education and the federal role
The education discussion turns on the claim that federal involvement is recent. Johnson dates the Department of Education to 1979 and calls it a negative; Zadek argues that eliminating it is not radical because what was revolutionary was moving education to the federal level in the first place, done, he says, without much public debate. Zadek recalls attending public school at the local level, where teachers were not living in fear of their jobs and education was not politicized, and describes the country as having detected “the total absence of a need” for federal intervention and then filling it anyway. A Better America (2010)
Johnson adds that federal education money costs the states more than it delivers — the conditions come, in his phrase, with “16 cents worth of strings attached” — so that taking the money ends up costing the states. A Better America (2010)
Welfare, health care and work
In the 2012 episode Johnson extends the laboratory argument to welfare and health care. Immigration, he says, should be about work rather than welfare, and he would make work visas easy to obtain, subject to a background check and a Social Security card so that taxes get paid. He proposes submitting a balanced budget to Congress in 2013 entailing reductions of 43% in Medicaid and Medicare, which he calls more than possible if the federal government block-grants the states a fixed amount and removes the mandates. He warns of a monetary collapse from printing and borrowing money to the tune of 43 cents out of every dollar spent, and concludes that health care and welfare benefits should be a state-by-state issue. The Triumph of Principle Over Politics (2012)
Zadek, responding, notes that Johnson has evoked Brandeis’s laboratories of innovation and also Milton Friedman, who struggled with open borders in the presence of a welfare state and held the welfare state to be the problem rather than immigration. The Triumph of Principle Over Politics (2012)
Tax competition and migration
The 2013 episode with Travis Brown, author of How Money Walks, treats interstate migration as the measurement of the experiment. Zadek says he likes that California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois have punitive tax policies and larger welfare states, because taxpayers have a choice and vote with their feet, staying or leaving; the states thus have a marketplace in which to test their theories. He offers his own case: a hypothetical $20,000 difference in state taxes between California and Texas is a premium he is willing to pay for the weather, the Dungeness crab and everything else he values about living north of the Golden Gate Bridge, but it is enough to chase other people out. Where is Everyone Going? (2013)
The Seventeenth Amendment and the loss of state sovereignty
Randall Holcombe supplies the show’s structural argument about what weakened the laboratories. Zadek calls the Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, a sea-change: before it the Senate was the states’ house, representing the states as political bodies and protecting them against federal intrusion into the police power historically reserved to them; afterward, in his account, states changed over time from independent co-equal political bodies into agencies of Washington, so that California became, in effect, the California Department of the federal government. [[episodes/john_marini_on__unmasking_the_administrative_state|John Marini on Unmasking the Administrative State (2019)]]
Holcombe’s contribution is a mechanism: before the amendment, legislation had to be approved by both the representatives of the people and the representatives of the states, and direct election of senators lowered that bar. His concrete example is the Affordable Care Act, which imposed higher costs on the states by requiring them to expand their Medicaid programs; a Senate representing state governments, he argues, would probably not have allowed those costs to be shifted. Randall G. Holcombe on Liberty in Peril (2019) Zadek agrees and draws the general conclusion: there would never be even one unfunded mandate, because the states through the Senate would not enact the legislation, and without the Seventeenth Amendment the states become far less the laboratories of democracy and innovation Brandeis observed. [[episodes/john_marini_on__unmasking_the_administrative_state|John Marini on Unmasking the Administrative State (2019)]]
Are states inherently rich or poor?
With Frank Buckley, Zadek turns the laboratory idea into a claim about wealth. He observes that Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan have little inherent wealth but free markets and personal freedom, and asks whether poor states are poor by nature or made poor by bad policies; if the latter, more federalism would let them become un-poor through their own political activity. Did California Just Declare Itself a Nation-State? (2020) Buckley endorses the point through George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty, written in the mid-’70s, which argued during the oil crisis that the Saudis are poor in the things that actually produce wealth — the ability of people to start businesses and the infrastructure supporting them — while Singapore and Hong Kong were making a go of it. Did California Just Declare Itself a Nation-State? (2020)
Zadek’s proof case is California: described as a wealthy state by any measure, with great weather, natural resources and agriculture, yet with more people living in poverty by federal standards than any other state as a percentage of the population. From this he concludes that no state is inherently rich or poor and that states are made that way by their policies. Did California Just Declare Itself a Nation-State? (2020)
Consent and natural rights
In the 2021 episode Zadek restates the laboratory idea in the language of consent. Competing jurisdictions, he says, are where policy gets experimented and one state learns from another’s success or failure, and the more such decisions are made locally the more we learn from each other. He then distinguishes expressed from implied consent, arguing that Americans are assumed at birth to consent to the core rights of person and property and to government protection of them. Rebranding Liberty with ‘Live and Let Live’ (2021)
The same passage contains his natural-rights argument: rights of free speech, association, assembly and worship are not held because the Constitution grants them but because we are human, and the Second Amendment is a reminder to government rather than a source of the right. Rights came first, he says, and then government to protect them. Rebranding Liberty with ‘Live and Let Live’ (2021)
Across episodes: the argument’s development
The concept appears in six episodes across eleven years, and what changes is the level of argument rather than the conclusion. In 2010 and 2012 Johnson and Zadek use the phrase instrumentally, as a reason to return education, welfare and health care to the states; in 2013 Zadek adds a measurement — migration and tax competition — supplied by Travis Brown’s research; in 2019 Randall Holcombe supplies the constitutional mechanism, the Seventeenth Amendment and the unfunded mandate, that explains why the laboratories were weakened; in 2020 Frank Buckley adds the wealth-and-poverty dimension through George Gilder; and in 2021 Zadek restates the idea as a matter of consent and natural rights. Johnson advances the policy applications, Zadek the Brandeis framing throughout, Holcombe the Seventeenth Amendment argument, Buckley the Gilder connection.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the full name of the case in which Brandeis wrote, the date of the decision, or the text of the passage beyond the sentence Zadek quotes. They do not say which amendment any case turned on, nor do they give the name of the education or welfare statutes discussed beyond the Department of Education and the Affordable Care Act. The excerpts also break off mid-sentence in several places, including Johnson’s account of his own schooling and Zadek’s introduction of the structural tax reform segment, and nothing is offered here about those unfinished passages.