Against Compliance Culture
“I have never understood why it is greed to want to keep the money you have earned, but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.” – Thomas Sowell
Interview date: October 13, 2020
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Joe Sixpack: Bob Zadek is the author and editor of the book Essential Liberty: Finding Freedom in the Post-COVID World. And man, I cannot wait to dig into this. Bob, thank you very much for taking time being on the show. Please tell us a little bit about the book.
Bob Zadek: The book is a collection of transcripts of really smart guests from my show. Every Sunday from 8–9am PACIFIC, live streamed nationally and on the web. The Bob Zadek Show is also a podcast.
The book was written because it became very obvious to me during the lockdown that it was unconstitutional and illegal. During the lockdown phase, all of a sudden, anger starts to grow and I it felt necessary to write about stuff people take for granted, until they no longer have them, and then you miss them terribly.
That’s true in many aspects of life, and for sure it is true with liberty. For the first time in the 231-year history of our country, large numbers of people were collectively deprived of their essential liberty. That has never happened before. In the beginning, they didn’t know what to do with it. They thought it was okay, because the government was telling them to do it for their own good.
“For the first time in the 231-year history of our country, large numbers of people were collectively deprived of their essential liberty.”
We’re now learning that’s not the case. So I wanted to help people understand why they were so angry all of a sudden, because something which they took for granted was now deprived. They couldn’t go to a house of worship, they couldn’t go to work, they couldn’t go to a restaurant, they couldn’t even socialize with the people they want to be with. That has never happened before. Yes, sick people were isolated by quarantine to protect the rest of us. But never were healthy people deprived of their liberty for their own good.
Joe Sixpack: That has actually disgusted me about business owners. They complied with this so readily. If I’m a business owner, if I owned a brick and mortar, I would have been down there, garnering everybody on the block, “Do not comply, we’ll all be here, we’ll all be armed. These guys come and we’ll defend our businesses. We will stay open.”
As an American, and who we are as individuals, I was blown away by how quickly they collapsed and complied with this illegal mandate by the socialist governors and mayors.
“I was blown away by how quickly they collapsed and complied with this illegal mandate by the socialist governors and mayors.”
Bob Zadek: In the beginning, everybody complied and just assumed that it was for their own good, which it wasn’t, and assumed that the government had the power to do so. There should be a presumption that any deprivation of liberty is per se illegal if not unconstitutional, instead of the presumption that it must be okay because the government is doing it.
That’s what I was objecting to in my book. The presumption that it is okay to be deprived of all of our liberty, not just some, all of our liberty, all at once by autocratic fiat. And it’s always done in the name of your security or your safety. You hear that BS line every time you go to an airport.
The most effective tool the Government has to acquire additional power is fear. It’s human nature. If you’re afraid, you look around for somebody with more power than you think you have to protect you. That is bred into us, and that’s natural. It is kind of healthy to look for health if you feel yourself at your wit’s end.
“The most effective tool the Government has to acquire additional power is fear.”
Joe Sickpack: I do kind of disagree with you in a way that that’s human nature, because one of the tenets of my book Socialism Sucks is that the difference between Europeans and Americans is that the Europeans are bred from the stock that stayed behind the “protective walls” of the king, local, noble, and the intrepid who went on the death ships and came out to America. We are of different stock.
“Europeans are bred from the stock that stayed behind the ‘protective walls’ of the king, local, noble, and the intrepid who went on the death ships and came out to America. We are of different stock.”
That stock seems to be waning. It is waning within Americans because we had it so good for so long. People who come here and leave a totalitarian regime, they do not take it for granted, not for one second, they are the ones who are preserving our first principles more than native born Americans. They risked everything to come here.
Bob Zadek: That’s right. And what you said there is absolutely key to my thinking. We have had it too good for too long in this country. We have not had an existential threat in this country since World War Two. We have had three to four generations of people growing up having everything they want and not willing to fight for what they believe in. This a very common thread, you can trace it back even to 9/11. We declared a war on terror. The government used that as an excuse to gain all these extraordinary powers.
The most effective tool of ratcheting up power and depriving us of liberty is fear. How will the war on terror end? It can never end. When we say we just killed the very last terrorist on Earth, he’s dead, now there are no more on Earth. That is a war that will never end, which means the PATRIOT Act never gets repealed, which means the monitoring of our phone calls never gets repealed. Now we have the COVID virus.
When will they declare there is no more a risk of the virus? When the last American has been vaccinated? Until then, Andrew Cuomo gets to control where the parents can send their kids to school?
The word war suggests the existential threat. That is the way our liberty recedes in favor of governmental power.
Joe Sixpack: Americans have to learn that is a tool. How do you get the average American to understand that? Most Americans think that it’s Democrat versus Republican. No, it’s them against us. That’s where we need to put our focus. Forget about the D or the R after their name. Those are two wings on the same bird. How do we get that message out to the Americans?
Bob Zadek: The way is to learn from the wisdom of our founders. Thomas Jefferson observed 237 years ago that the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and governments to gain ground. Madison warned us that Democracy never lasts long. There was never democracy yet that did not commit suicide. One can say the upcoming election is maybe about democracy committing suicide, with the threat of court packing, elimination of the filibuster, and a one-party government. We may be watching the suicide of democracy.
Joe Sixpack: I completely agree. We are not really a democracy. We are a constitutional republic. And I think that’s a stepping stone that most people don’t understand. We had a guest on right before you named Larry Klayman, a brilliant guy. He said we have to have a peaceful revolution. He was talking about the courts and such, but I think we have become a socialist nation already, we have been for some time.
Bob Zadek: Well, there’s not one secret of reclaiming what you say. There’s not one secret, but there are a lot of very healthy, peaceful, painless steps along the way. The job of the legislatures has been changed from representing us to getting reelected. We have to make an elected official a really crappy job, so that only people who are committed to making the world a better place will want to do it. How do you do that? Intelligent voting. Do not vote for people who mirror what you believe to be your worldview, but elect people for their integrity, their commitment to the rule of law, to the core values that we all more or less have in common.
If somebody is committed to personal freedom, the rule of law, the rights of private property, and individual responsibility, and if they are committed to those very basic values, they cannot do a bad job when elected. I don’t care what party they’re on, you will re elect them and re-elect them. You elect people for their values, not because they further some specific governmental goal like higher minimum wage, or more unions or less unions, or more fracking. If you vote values, you’ll never be disappointed if your elected official will never break your heart.
Joe Sixpack: I wish I could fully agree with that. Socialism puts this ideal up there. Capitalism accounts for human greed, and what you didn’t what I didn’t hear and what you just said was accounting for human greed. It’s fear, and it’s greed and those two things and that’s why socialism is a false start. And I would like to hear your thoughts on that when we get back after the break, which is coming up now.
Bob Zadek: Thomas Sowell said, “I have never understood why it is greed to want to keep the money you have earned, but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.” How is that?
Joe Sixpack: That’s exactly what the left is so great at projectionism. They take exactly what they do, they flip it 180 degrees, and then they blame the other side for it. That’s a fantastic point.
Bob Zadek: The interesting thing about capitalism, and the genius of capitalism is that capitalism marshalls a very strong motivation of self interest. Everybody behaves in their own self interest. And the genius of capitalism is that it harnesses that self interest for the common good. The only way I can make a profit is by manufacturing or selling something that you want at the very price you want to pay. I live and breathe every minute to satisfy you.
In capitalism, we have millions and millions of people who try to make you happy. How can you beat that? Now compare that with socialism, as you have written in your book, where nobody who delivers goods and services gives a darn whether you are happy or not — you get it, take it or leave it. They don’t care. They have their business by operation of law, not because you have selected them. When you are compelled to buy a product, the seller of the product really doesn’t care if you like it or not. It’s the only game in town. And that’s, that’s the importance of the message.
Joe Sixpack: Without capitalism, there is no charity. The biggest donor to any natural catastrophe is private US citizens. That doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world.
Bob Zadek: Let’s close with, if you may add, Adam, one of my favorite Adam Smith quotes, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
