The Department of Motor Vehicles functions in The Bob Zadek Show less as an institution to be described than as a shared reference point for government administration. Across four episodes between 2013 and 2023, guests and host invoke the DMV to illustrate what they treat as the defining feature of public enterprise: the absence of an incentive to serve the customer. The comparison is applied to healthcare financing, to socialist economies and to public-sector labor relations, but the excerpts never discuss the agency’s own organization, fees, state-level variation or history.
The DMV as a standard of comparison
The earliest use in the excerpts comes from Judge Jim Gray, who in a 2013 episode on government intervention in healthcare argues that competitive markets deliver services the government cannot. Gray points to LASIK eye surgery and cosmetic surgery as areas where, because government is not involved, patients can obtain good quality care at reasonable competitive prices. He contrasts this with the rest of medicine and with government provision generally, and proposes that people who cannot care for themselves be served through government clinics, possibly on private contract, with the federal government kept out of the arrangement entirely We Are All Libertarians (2013).
Bob Zadek’s framing in the same episode is broader. He argues that the Affordable Care Act moves the country toward having the Department of Motor Vehicles run healthcare as well as the rest of people’s lives, and that this flatly does not work. He develops the point through a history of federal involvement in medicine: a wholly private delivery system before World War II, wartime wage and price controls that led employers to offer tax-free health insurance as a benefit, and a late-1970s statute requiring hospitals not to turn away emergency room patients who could not afford care. Gray agrees with the account and adds Richard Nixon’s early-1970s wage and price controls and Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare to the sequence We Are All Libertarians (2013).
Incentives and customer service
The most developed statement of the analogy comes from Ben Powell in a 2019 episode on socialism. Describing travel in Cuba, Powell contrasts state-owned hotels with casas particulares, private apartments rented for profit. The government hotels, he says, are run-down and awful because managers have no incentive to serve guests, while the casas, at the same or lower prices, are well-kept and their operators punctual. He summarizes the comparison by asking what it would be like to have the Department of Motor Vehicles in one’s state run the whole economy, and what that would do to incentives for customer service Socialism… Still Not Cool (2019).
Powell’s broader argument in the episode concerns variety and incentives under socialism. He describes Cuban private restaurants as serving the same dozen to 18 items prepared the same ways because of the state supply chain, while Cuban food in Little Havana is delicious and highly varied. Zadek draws out the point that consumers are the audience an economic system must serve, and that the lack of variety demonstrates the difference between a socialist and a capitalist economy. Powell defines socialism as government ownership of the means of production and uses the hotels as his side-by-side case Socialism… Still Not Cool (2019).
The DMV in the single-payer debate
Sally Pipes, in a 2019 episode on the cost of “free” healthcare, uses the DMV to argue that governments are not as efficient at running things as the private sector. She cites the difficulty of getting an appointment to renew a driver’s license, take a road test or obtain one of the new ID cards, and says there is no incentive for government employees to provide efficient service. She extends the comparison to the Post Office, which she says has become somewhat more efficient because of competition from DHL, UPS and FedEx Sally Pipes on the High Cost of Free Stuff (2019).
Pipes directs the analogy at proposals she attributes to Bernie Sanders, Pramila Jayapal and Elizabeth Warren, under which private options would be outlawed for anything considered medically necessary. She predicts that a million people employed in the insurance industry would lose their jobs, that the federal bureaucracy would have to increase significantly, and that doctors and hospitals would be paid Medicare rates rather than current rates. She warns that turning the American system over to government would mean letting it be run like the DMV, and calls that a disaster Sally Pipes on the High Cost of Free Stuff (2019).
Her other figures in the episode include the claim that the average Canadian family pays $13,300 a year in hidden taxes for a system that does not provide timely care; that Medicare and Medicaid, begun under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, cost $3 billion in their first year against a prediction of $12 billion by 1990 but in effect cost $110 billion; and that Canada, North Korea and Cuba are the only three countries with true single-payer systems in which private coverage is banned. She also cites polling in which support for Medicare for All falls to 37 percent when respondents are told they could not keep their employer-sponsored coverage or would face new taxes Sally Pipes on the High Cost of Free Stuff (2019).
The DMV and public-sector management
The final appearance in the excerpts comes from Philip K. Howard in a 2023 episode on public service unions. Howard praises Mitch Daniels as a leader who, unlike most politicians, focuses on how things work day to day, and offers making the Department of Motor Vehicles in Indiana work better as an example of the kind of management that matters more to most Americans than abstract national debates Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023).
Howard’s main argument concerns the difference between private and public unions, which he characterizes as the difference between a fish and a mammal. He offers four distinctions: incentives, since both sides in a private trade union have an interest in the viability of the enterprise while government cannot move; the scope of bargaining, since private unions divide profit while public unions can demand whatever they can get away with because taxpayers pay; an ethical difference, citing Franklin Roosevelt’s statement that the process of collective bargaining cannot be transferred to the public sector; and what Howard calls collusion, in which public unions help elect officials who then sit on the same side of the bargaining table. Zadek supplements the point by noting that Howard does not mean illegal conduct, and Howard agrees that such collusion would be illegal in the private sector but is not illegal in the public sector, though he calls it dishonest Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023).
Across episodes: a fixed analogy
The DMV analogy recurs across all four episodes without developing. In 2013 Zadek applies it to the Affordable Care Act and Gray to government healthcare generally; in 2019 Powell applies it to a socialist economy and Pipes to single-payer proposals; in 2023 Howard uses it as an example of mundane public management. No speaker in the excerpts revises or disputes the comparison, and no episode examines the agency itself, so the excerpts show repetition of a fixed rhetorical figure rather than an argument that changes between the earlier and later treatments.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no account of the Department of Motor Vehicles’ structure, funding, state-level organization or history, and no guest defends the agency or responds to the analogy on its behalf. No excerpt names a specific DMV office, statute, regulation or official, and the Indiana reference is only a passing example of managerial attention. The sources also do not establish when or where any of the described experiences with the agency occurred.