Homeownership and the “ownership society”
In an April 2010 episode on the credit crunch, Bob Zadek devoted a segment to the American Dream and rejected its identification with homeownership. He said the phrase was a soaring principle, then asked how anyone could suggest that the millions of families who rent are somehow not living the American Dream, naming George Bush and President Obama as promoters of the homeownership equation. Zadek said the American Dream is the dream to live free of government interference, to raise children to be better and better educated, and to have political freedom, adding that men did not die at Valley Forge so somebody in Levittown, Long Island, could mow their lawn. The Credit Crunch (2010)
Zadek tied the homeownership push to economic stimulus rather than principle. He argued that because homebuyers must buy durable goods such as refrigerators, beds and furniture, paint the place and mow the lawns, elected officials realized that pushing people into homes turbocharges the economy, and that the more people are sucked into homeownership the more the economy is boosted. He described this as government interference with the marketplace and as the failure of government rather than of the market. The Credit Crunch (2010)
He named a specific statute: a bill passed in December of 2003 called the American Dream Downpayment Initiative, which he said nobody knew about and nobody paid attention to. According to Zadek, it provided money to states and localities with a population of at least 150,000 people to get an allocation of $50,000 a homeowner to help them buy a home. He asked what business it is of government to help people buy homes, and said people should buy homes if they can afford them, not because government induces them to. The Credit Crunch (2010)
Later in the same episode, responding to a caller named Vasu on moral hazard, Zadek extended the argument to personal responsibility. He said being in the world imposes responsibilities, that people have to look after themselves and their families, and that we are not here to pick up the messes people leave behind because of their own irresponsible behavior. He said that insulating people from personal responsibility reinforces bad behavior and builds a dependent society, and that the 94% who look after themselves will be around to pick up those messes. The Credit Crunch (2010)
Zadek then addressed a hypothetical homeowner directly: he said he would not pick up that person’s mess, that the homeowner has no birthright to live in the home they are living in, and that the right to live in a home depends on being able to afford it. If not, he said, become a renter — which he described not as a death sentence but simply as being a renter. He said one can very much enjoy the American Dream by renting a home, retaining economic and political freedom, and just not mowing a lawn anymore. The Credit Crunch (2010)
Mobility, Lincoln, and the aristocratic drift
F.H. Buckley, a professor of law at George Mason University and author of The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America, discussed the decline of economic and social mobility in the United States in a July 2016 episode, comparing it to other first-world nations such as Canada and examining how immigration policies and legal structures contribute to the hardening of class lines. [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_way_back__restoring_the_promi|F.H. Buckley on The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America (2016)]]
In a July 2022 episode, Buckley returned to the theme and gave the phrase a specific origin and definition. He said the American Dream was something invented by Abraham Lincoln, and defined it as: wherever you are, wherever you come from, whoever you are, you can get ahead and your kids will have it better off than you did. He said the term used to be called the American Dream, framing it as a description of mobility that the country no longer lives up to. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022)
Buckley argued that the United States has become immobile and aristocratic. He said that when he moved from Canada he was immediately struck at how this is a class society where people do not move up the ranks as opposed to other countries, and that if you look at the data, the country is not only less than mobile but aristocratic, as aristocratic pretty much as England is, and way behind countries like Denmark and Canada in the mobility sweepstakes. He said libertarians should be on the side of mobility as opposed to aristocracy. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022)
Buckley grounded the mobility argument in Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis, which he called the greatest analysis of American history and praised Turner as the inventor of jurisdictional competition. He described Turner’s 1890 framing as West versus East: the West democratic, egalitarian, the home of Republican virtue and of nationalism, and the East aristocratic, corrupt, and home to cosmopolitan types who suffered from a bit of cultural cringe with respect to England and Europe generally. Buckley said that because the country has become so immobile, there has never been a greater need for a desire for mobility as opposed to aristocracy. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022)
Buckley also drew a lesson from Turner about competition between regions. He said Turner described states competing, with the West offering free institutions and mobility as opposed to an aristocratic East, and that the East, realizing it was losing people, found that it had to democratize as well — a trend Buckley said carried back to Europe, which had to democratize itself because people were moving to North America. He presented this as a history of the triumph of Western ideas. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022)
Bob Zadek responded in passionate support of what he called geographic mobility, noting that regular listeners would recall his earlier guest Ilya Somin, who has written extensively on what he called foot voting, which Zadek described as far more democratic than ballot box voting, where people vote for a system of government by leaving one and joining another. Zadek said Somin has written more than one book on the subject, that geographic mobility is one of the ways the country was built as immigrants voted with their feet in the millions, and that his audience would support what Buckley said. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022)
Business creation and the free-market “un-system”
In an August 2021 episode, Bob Zadek framed the American Dream in terms of business formation. He said everybody tries to capture that wonderful phrase and apply it as they wish, that the Dream is quite personal, but that one component is that you can come here and with your own skill and grit and investing your own money build a business from scratch and employ people the way you want to do it. He said that can only take place in a bottom-up capitalist society, and asked how what is happening to small business in America affects whether the country is still a capitalist society. Carol Roth on the War on Small Business (2021)
Carol Roth, described by Zadek as having spent her life in finance as an investment banker, an author, and the host of her own podcast, laid out a spectrum of ways to organize an economy and of freedom. On one side she placed capitalism or free markets, which she defined as freedom, choice, transparency with the guardrails of property rights — not even a system, she said, but an “un-system” because nobody is organizing it and people simply do what they want freely by choice, which determines the outcome. She said history has proven this is the best way to create prosperity, and that it is not only financial prosperity but the ability and flexibility to do what you want to earn a living, a choice she called a privilege vis-à-vis many parts of the world where people must think only about survival. Carol Roth on the War on Small Business (2021)
On the other side of the spectrum Roth placed central planning, a term she said covers whatever one wants to call socialism or communism, the point being a handful of people making decisions on behalf of the masses using force, control and coercion, usually opaquely. She said that if you look at the amount of government spending, the parts of the economy the government has in effect nationalized such as the student lending business, the number of laws, and the purview of things government now decides instead of individuals, you would argue the country is at least a hybrid central-planned economy. She cited the $3.5 trillion budget framework then being proposed as taking the country further in that direction, along with stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits, proposals for expanding education to pre-K and free tuition for community college, and proposals to lower the Medicare age and expand benefits. Carol Roth on the War on Small Business (2021)
Roth argued that these measures consolidate power and limit wealth creation opportunities, making it harder to succeed in a business, harder to succeed in the stock market without taking on more risk, and harder to be a retiree or saver without government help, while the Fed destroys the dollar. She said people forget that government does nothing productive, so the money is either the taxpayers’ or printed out of nowhere, decreasing the value of the dollar or creating debt to be paid back later — adding a mafioso-like middleman. She called this the big threat to economic freedom and the overarching message of her book. Carol Roth on the War on Small Business (2021)
A family company as the Dream lived
In a June 2018 episode with Joel Engel about Scorched Worth: A True Story of Destruction, Deceit, and Government Corruption, the American Dream appears as a biographical achievement rather than a policy. Engel described the founding of Sierra Pacific Industries by Archie Aldis, nicknamed Red Emmerson because of his hair, in about 1950 or 1951. Engel said Emmerson had a childhood so bad that calling it Dickensian is not quite right, that he had basically been on his own since age eight, and that he started the company as a tiny small mill in Arcata, California. [[episodes/joel_engel_on__scorched_worth__a_true_story_of_des|Joel Engel on Scorched Worth: A True Story of Destruction, Deceit, and Government Corruption, 6/3 (2018)]]
Engel said Emmerson had a high school education and no advanced education, and built the company slowly and methodically by outworking and outthinking everyone into one of the leading lumber suppliers in the United States. He noted the company is still family-held rather than a public corporation, with Red’s sons George and Mark still mostly controlling it, and that Emmerson became the third largest individual landholder of forest lands in the United States, buying land as the federal government made it harder to cut on US forest lands. Engel said every American should salute him because he created the American dream, lived it, created it, and defined it. [[episodes/joel_engel_on__scorched_worth__a_true_story_of_des|Joel Engel on Scorched Worth: A True Story of Destruction, Deceit, and Government Corruption, 6/3 (2018)]]
Across episodes: the same phrase, different owners
The topic recurs across the excerpts, but the treatment does not develop so much as divide. Bob Zadek in 2010 attacks the equation of the American Dream with homeownership and with the American Dream Downpayment Initiative, while F.H. Buckley in 2016 and 2022 defines the Dream as Lincoln’s promise of mobility and measures the country against mobility data, and Carol Roth in 2021 locates it in the freedom to build a business under a free-market “un-system.” Joel Engel’s 2018 account supplies a concrete instance of the Dream as a life story rather than a policy. The later episodes do not revise Zadek’s 2010 argument; they attach the same phrase to different subjects.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the full text or legislative history of the American Dream Downpayment Initiative beyond what Zadek says about it, nor do they give the outcome of any case or the amendment a case turned on. They do not provide the data behind Buckley’s mobility comparisons, only his characterization of it. They do not say how Roth’s proposed budget framework fared, and Engel’s account of Red Emmerson breaks off before the sentence about creating the American Dream is complete.