Competition is treated across The Bob Zadek Show as the mechanism by which consumers obtain the best goods at the cheapest prices, and as a standard against which legislation, taxation and public institutions are judged. The excerpts present it both as an economic process and as a test of political courage, with Bob Zadek arguing that Americans profess to admire competition while enacting laws that shield them from it.
Competition as an American goal and the charge of cowardice
In an episode on the founding, Bob Zadek argues that the United States has become a nation of cowards afraid of competition. He notes that Americans watch professional sports for their competitive nature and treat winning honestly as a theoretical American goal, yet enact minimum wage laws so that people do not compete on the price of labor, along with protectionist statutes that he attributes to economic cowardice. He asks what the country has become when it imposes tariffs and duties to prevent foreign products from competing with American products, and why it does not instead tell anyone who wants to sell here to bring it on. The result of competition, in his account, is that consumers get to buy the best product at the cheapest price, and he asks how a legislature dares deny him that right. He credits the Institute for Justice with preserving the right to compete in goods and services for an honest price, and the guest, Anthony Sanders, directs listeners to the organization’s website and mentions its case in Lake Elmo, Minnesota The Great Founding Fathers (2010).
Competition between states and the direction of taxation
A later episode extends the idea to competition among states. Bob Zadek asks his guest, Travis Brown, how much governors and state legislatures feel the competition of other states, and how much of the activity is driven by competition rather than by political ambition, naming Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry as figures with possible presidential runs. Brown answers that Jindal’s plan, which he reviewed over several hours in joint legislative committees with the Department of Revenue and local staff, is serious, well balanced and deliberate, and that the same is true of plans from Governors Brownback in Kansas, Walker in Wisconsin and Kasich in Ohio, which he describes as within reason and within strike zone of returning more money to taxpayers Where is Everyone Going? (2013).
Bob Zadek then characterizes the state-level competition as healthy, citing Michigan’s enactment of a right-to-work statute as a response to competition from Southern states, and states competing to bring business in by offering sometimes too generous a tax package. He argues that a libertarian view of taxation need not remain theoretical, because the data Brown presents can be pointed to as proof. In the same episode, Bob Zadek describes a shift toward consumption taxes as economies move from goods to services, meaning that barbers, hair salons, attorneys, lawyers and accountants would be taxed, a price he accepts as a practicing attorney whose clients must consider it. He also distinguishes states that decide how much to spend and then figure out how to pay for it from states that set a level of taxation encouraging growth and then decide how to spend what they have, calling the first a problem and the second no problem Where is Everyone Going? (2013).
Cutthroat competition, layoffs and labor regulation
In a 2022 episode with Steven E. Rhoads, Bob Zadek objects to the way public discussion precedes the word competition with cutthroat, as if that were sinister. He argues that the smartest people spend day and night in company offices trying to figure out how to give consumers exactly what they want at the price they want to pay, fighting for the privilege of satisfying their needs, and that firms that fail lose and are immediately forgotten, leaving only survivors who have learned to do this well. Rhoads agrees and adds that economists regard layoffs as a sign that labor has been redistributed toward more productive things, comparing a refusal ever to lay anyone off to a refusal to have electronics or other improvements, since workers for new industries must come from somewhere, including from people who no longer have jobs making steel The Economist’s View of the World (2022).
Bob Zadek extends the point by comparing a business that lays off workers to an individual who switches from an expensive hairdresser to a cheaper one offering the same service, arguing that the consumer has made exactly the same economic decision with smaller impact and without guilt. Rhoads responds with a debate between Bill Gates and Larry Summers over a tax on robots, in which Summers asks why robots should be singled out when any machine that puts a person out of work does the same thing. Rhoads also describes French rules applying to companies of more than 50 people, including paid vacation and restrictions on firing, which he says lead firms to pay overtime rather than hire, produce well-paid employees alongside high unemployment, and leave the unemployed out of work for over a year; he reports that an economist counted businesses with 49 employees against those with 51 and found almost none with 51. Bob Zadek calls this the marginal cost of the 51st employee, who is legislated out of a job, and Rhoads adds that the cost of all the previously hired employees rises as well The Economist’s View of the World (2022).
Competition, private property and public provision
The same 2022 episode contains a broader argument about who should spend money. Bob Zadek frames redistribution of wealth as a judgment about whether the owner of the money or the government makes the best spending decisions for economic growth and the common good, asking whether the political process or someone driven to make more money, and therefore to invest wisely, should spend it. Rhoads answers by citing Deirdre McCloskey’s observation that the median person today has roughly 23 times as much real wealth as in 1800, and contrasts the company store of 1820, when going to the next town required a horse and fifteen miles, with the competition now available from Walmart and Amazon around the clock. He also cites a Georgetown survey of confidence in twenty institutions in which the military ranked first, Amazon second, Google third, Congress last and the President eighteenth out of twenty, and notes that people nonetheless vote for more help with medical costs, food and gas. He adds that Jeff Bezos was the person businessmen would choose to run a company they invested in, and that when Seattle tried to impose a special tax on his employees he said he would move, after which the city council changed its mind — an illustration, in his telling, that private property limits how far owners can be abused The Economist’s View of the World (2022).
In a 2014 episode on campus due process, Bob Zadek sums up by saying he is not anti-public education per se but simply pro-increased competition, supporting anything that creates a competitive environment so that nobody can take their job for granted. John Rothmann replies that competition already exists in the form of public, private and parochial schools, that Zadek’s envisioning of it is absolutely essential, and that public education is the backbone of American democracy, which is why he supports it Aren’t Men Entitled to Due Process on Campus? (2014).
Across episodes
Competition recurs from 2010 to 2022, and the treatment shifts in emphasis rather than in conclusion. In the 2010 episode Bob Zadek states the case in moral and political terms, attacking minimum wage laws, tariffs and protectionism as economic cowardice and crediting the Institute for Justice with defending the right to compete. By 2013 the same conviction is applied to competition among states over tax regimes, with Travis Brown supplying the governors and plans and Bob Zadek calling the competition healthy. In 2022 Steven E. Rhoads supplies the empirical and historical material — McCloskey’s wealth comparison, the Georgetown confidence survey, the French threshold of 50 employees — while Bob Zadek supplies the framing of cutthroat competition as a benefit to consumers and of layoffs as the same decision individuals make when they change hairdressers. The 2014 exchange with John Rothmann is the only one in which a speaker defends public provision against the competition argument, and it does so by asserting that public education is the backbone of American democracy.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not define competition formally, nor do they address antitrust law, monopoly or the conditions under which competition fails. They say nothing about the outcomes of the Institute for Justice case in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, beyond its mention, and nothing about how the state tax plans discussed by Travis Brown fared. The Cyprus discussion in the 2013 episode concerns sovereign risk and depositor losses rather than competition, and the excerpt breaks off mid-sentence. No excerpt states the legal basis on which any case was decided.