The excerpts provided do not discuss ISIS. No speaker in any of the four episodes names the organization, describes its origins, leadership, territory, tactics, or designation by any government. The article below therefore records only what the sources state about the topics they do address — crisis governance, the growth of state power, and regulatory barriers — and notes at the end the absence of any material on ISIS itself.
Crisis and the expansion of government power
In the April 1, 2020 episode, Bob Zadek introduced the thesis of Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan, describing it as a treatise by a well-respected economist. Zadek said the book argues that during each crisis — whether 9/11, the 2007 crisis, or others — government creates new special temporary powers to get through, and that freedom with respect to property or persons is taken away. He offered withholding taxes, created to finance World War II, and the Patriot Act after 9/11 as examples, and said he defied anyone to name even one example of government returning those freedoms after a crisis passed The Single Most Common Economic Fallacy in COVID-19 Reporting (2020).
Guest Don Boudreaux called the thesis famous and proven beyond dispute, attributing it to Higgs’s 1987 book Crisis and Leviathan. Boudreaux said Higgs goes back to the beginning of American history up through the mid-1980s showing one crisis after another, some more genuine than others, in which people grant government more power to get through the crisis. Typically, immediately following each crisis, the amount of government power scales back a little, but never by as much as it increased — producing what Boudreaux called a ratcheting up of government power. He said the history is well-settled and hard to dispute The Single Most Common Economic Fallacy in COVID-19 Reporting (2020).
Boudreaux added that increased power created during crisis times and remaining afterward is used during non-crisis times to put in place policies that lead to future crises. He cited Certificate of Need regulations as an example: when first implemented the policy does not seem to have much in the way of problems, but by the time of the coronavirus issue there was a crisis of shortage of hospital beds potentially, created in part by a government policy meant to avoid rising healthcare costs. He predicted that some government powers accumulated in the preceding weeks would be scaled back a bit but would not all go away, and that there would be more government in people’s lives at the end of the crisis than at the beginning The Single Most Common Economic Fallacy in COVID-19 Reporting (2020).
Flash policy and spontaneous order
In the August 5, 2020 episode, Zadek framed the pandemic as perhaps more an economic crisis than a health crisis and asked how much of it was an unforced error attributable not to a little virus but to a large government. He said that if government is at fault then voters are at fault, because they are responsible for the government that governs over them, and that the purpose of the show was to understand the mistakes so informed voters could fix them Reversing the Ratchet (2020).
Zadek asked guest Ryan Young about what he called “flash policy” — the process by which government reached the conclusion to lock down. Young, identified by Zadek as a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, responded that it was not government that started the lockdown; people did. Once people learned what it takes to flatten the curve and what physical distancing and wearing masks can do, they started doing it, and that was much more helpful than any mandate that came along later. Young said politicians in different states reacted differently, some with very severe mandates and others arguably not severe enough, but that government is not in charge at a fundamental level — the virus is. Ordinary people decide whether to wear masks or observe physical distancing, and politicians see which direction the parade is headed and scramble to get to the head of it; they are not really leading but following Reversing the Ratchet (2020).
Zadek connected this to the common law, saying that in the United States and in England people behaved in society in a certain way and the law evolved not by legislation but by people observing that certain things were wrong, and that statutes later codified norms millions of people had reached. He characterized what Young described as the common law of behavior in a pandemic, in which people freely arrived at conclusions that fit their circumstances. Young agreed and added that because the virus is novel, people are still learning and adapting, and that in trial and error a big part of trial is error, so people can make mistakes and learn from them more quickly and on a much more mass scale than can Congress or — at which point the excerpt breaks off Reversing the Ratchet (2020).
The 2008 financial crisis as a case study
In the January 8, 2015 episode, guest John Allison told Zadek that the primary cause of the financial crisis was government policy, that the United States does not have a free market but a mixed economy, and that financial services is the most regulated industry in the world and the one with the biggest problems. Allison said the economic correction was caused by government policies that incented people to purchase homes they should not have purchased, financed by the Federal Reserve artificially printing and expanding the monetary supply. He said the subsidy to housing goes back a long period but became exponential because of a focus starting with Bill Clinton and other governmental leaders to force Freddie and Fannie Mae to have at least half their loans to subprime lenders, and that when Freddie and Fannie failed they owed $5 trillion and had $2 trillion in subprime mortgages and dominated the subprime market John Allison on the Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure (2015).
Zadek said the important takeaway is that people including Paul Krugman have indicated the financial crisis was the failure of markets, which he called utterly absurd: there were no markets involved, only humans responding to a government stimulus the way a plant leaf turns toward the sun. Allison agreed that government incentive created the crisis but said a number of business leaders also failed, because despite the incentives there were indications the lending was irrational, and CEOs of large financial institutions did not take steps to protect their own institutions. He said his company BB&T did not have a single quarterly loss during the financial crisis John Allison on the Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure (2015).
Zadek observed that shareholders ultimately came out fine because of the bailouts, and Allison agreed that was true for some institutions while others, such as Washington Mutual, saw shareholders wiped out. Allison said that under what he called crony statism, Citigroup got saved and Wachovia failed for no rational reason except that Citigroup had more political contacts, and that a huge amount of injustice went on in that process. He said they let Lehman fail and saved Bear Stearns, so there was no rationality to the decision-making, and that a natural economic correction became an artificial crisis environment because of the arbitrary way decisions were made and the lack of rule of law John Allison on the Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure (2015).
Regulation and the housing market
In the March 16, 2020 episode, Zadek asked guest Lawrence J. McQuillan whether supply and demand was still working in housing, since expensive housing was still being built. McQuillan said Zadek was partially right: the Bay Area is very productive compared to other labor markets, people who move there command very high salaries, and that income helps drive housing prices higher. He said some housing is being built at the higher end of the price spectrum, but that things at the lower rungs of the housing ladder are not being built because of restrictions on the supply of new capital coming into the housing market Homelessness & Housing Policy in the Golden State (2020).
Zadek asked whether there is a housing crisis in Beverly Hills, Palm Springs, or on Park Avenue, answering that of course there is not, but that there is for sure a shortage of low-income housing. McQuillan said people in Palm Springs and Beverly Hills can afford the costs of government regulations, and that more housing would be built in those areas without the restriction, but that people of that income range can pay for the restrictions imposed while people elsewhere in the state cannot, so the housing does not get built Homelessness & Housing Policy in the Golden State (2020).
Zadek said people do not have an inherent birthright to live in the most valuable real estate on earth, and that the issue is nationwide rather than a California topic. He said the Bay Area has a tradition of a mix in its population of low-income people, ethnicity, and people on various rungs of the wage scale, but is in effect legislating that concept away, and asked whether the crisis is nothing other than a lifestyle crisis rather than an economic or housing quantity issue Homelessness & Housing Policy in the Golden State (2020).
Across episodes: the ratchet
The ratchet thesis appears in two episodes. In the April 1, 2020 episode, Don Boudreaux presented it as an established historical finding drawn from Robert Higgs’s 1987 book, with Certificate of Need regulations as the mechanism by which past crisis powers generate future crises. In the August 5, 2020 episode, Ryan Young shifted the emphasis from government power to spontaneous individual action, arguing that people began physical distancing and mask-wearing before mandates and that politicians followed rather than led. The excerpts show a change of emphasis between the two treatments — from the durability of state power to the priority of private adaptation — but no disagreement between the guests, and the January 2015 and March 2020 episodes touch the topic only obliquely, through the 2008 crisis and housing regulation respectively.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no information about ISIS: no founding date, no leaders, no territory, no military campaigns, no designation by any government, and no discussion by any guest. Any encyclopedia article on that organization would require sources this corpus does not supply. The material above is included only because it is what the excerpts actually address, and it should not be read as bearing on ISIS in any way.