Deregulation credited to Carter
Carter enters the program chiefly as a deregulator. In a discussion of the Fairness Doctrine, Paul Matzko calls Carter “the true great deregulator,” saying he deregulated everything from airline tickets and flight routes to craft beer and deregulated the airwaves in significant ways, and that the Carter FCC decided to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine as rigorously, so that it began to wane in the late 1970s The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine (2021). Matzko places this alongside Ronald Reagan’s 1987 repeal of the doctrine and his veto of a bipartisan congressional attempt to codify it.
Bob Zadek makes the same claim in a 2022 conversation with John Giadjopoulos, saying Carter did more for deregulation than Reagan and much more than Nixon, and that he deregulated the airlines and rail transit. Zadek calls these monumental steps whose benefits are still enjoyed, and says Carter is not given sufficient credit for them Dick Morris on the 2022 and 2024 Elections (2022).
Nick Gillespie, discussing The Declaration of Independents, the book he wrote with Matt Welch, groups Carter with Ted Kennedy and Ralph Nader in the late 1970s as having helped usher in a world that is richer and more interesting and more innovative. In Gillespie’s account the results include more free travel because airlines were deregulated, cheaper goods because trucking was deregulated, and craft beer because homebrewing was deregulated Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011).
The Carter energy plan and federal mandates
Carter also appears as the author of an energy program that the show treats as overreach. In a 2010 episode with Doug Bandow, Bandow says the Jimmy Carter energy plan set temperatures for buildings open to the public, so that federal law determined what the temperature should be in an office building, which he calls an amazing overreach of politicians The Age of Unenlightment (2010). In the same segment Zadek criticizes the Department of Energy, saying the department was mandated by Congress to create efficiency standards for appliances and was supposed to update them in 1997 but fell behind. Zadek argues that if the government is inefficient in setting standards, it cannot dictate efficiency, and he objects to curly fluorescent bulbs in hotel lighting fixtures, saying Congress dictates how homes must look but does not do the same for itself. Bandow frames the underlying issue as a threat to liberty and says the choice should not be set in the political process.
Character, competence and the presidency
The longest treatment of Carter comes in the 2022 episode with Giadjopoulos, where Carter serves as the example in an argument about how presidents are selected. Zadek observes that politicians are always the least respected profession, below lawyers, and that the individual elected president is probably elected because that candidate is the best politician — appointed to the highest office in the world for being best at the most despised occupation. He says the skills needed to be elected have nothing to do with the skills needed to be an effective president, and that the skill set cannot be predicted because it depends on what the center of gravity is while in office: if it is foreign policy and you are a peanut farmer, you bring little to the table about foreign policy Dick Morris on the 2022 and 2024 Elections (2022).
Giadjopoulos takes up Zadek’s passing reference to Carter, saying many people would call his administration a horrible disaster because he was a horrible president, while asking who has been a better human being than Jimmy Carter, citing Habitat for Humanity and calling him exemplary as a man. Zadek agrees that the presidency failed overall but returns to deregulation, then lists the failures: Iran and the manufactured shortage of gasoline, with the gas lines. He notes Carter was a peanut farmer who did not get elected because he was a deregulator or because he was skillful in foreign policy, and that after leaving office he took the same character qualities into a rich, full life that made a meaningful contribution to many people. Zadek contrasts this with Reagan, who brought a belief system to the country exactly when it was needed and, with Margaret Thatcher in the UK, changed the world for the better — an example, he says, where everybody who voted for Reagan knew what they were going to get and pretty much got it.
Across episodes
Carter’s deregulation is asserted in three episodes — by Matzko in 2021, by Gillespie in 2011, and by Zadek in 2022 — with the later treatments adding rail transit and the explicit comparison to Reagan, while the 2010 episode treats the Carter energy plan only as federal overreach. The excerpts show no development in the underlying judgment: Carter is consistently a good deregulator and a failed president, and the 2022 episode is the only one that adds character and post-presidential life to the ledger.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts say nothing about Carter’s early life, his naval service, his terms as governor, or the details of his presidency beyond Iran, gasoline shortages, the energy plan, and deregulation. They do not name the statutes or agencies behind the airline, trucking, rail, or beer changes, nor the cases or amendments involved in the Fairness Doctrine. No guest gives dates for Carter’s presidency or for the deregulatory measures, and the excerpts contain no discussion of the Camp David Accords, the hostage crisis in detail, or his later electoral defeat.