In The Bob Zadek Show, “concentration of power” is treated as the central political evil. Bob Zadek states the premise directly: libertarians “abhor and fear any concentration of power, whether it is in the executive branch in Washington, whether it is through unfair business practices in a commercial setting” Matt Zwolinski on Bleeding Heart Libertarianism (2014). The phrase recurs across episodes on poverty, the presidency, the Supreme Court, lobbying, and foreign policy, and it is almost always tied to the Founders’ design.
The Founders’ fear
Zadek frames the American founding as a revolt against concentrated authority. “The Founders abhorred any concentration of power,” he says, and their driving motivation was to deliver power to the people through elected representatives rather than let it reside in an unelected hereditary office Has America Become an “Elective Monarchy”? (2014). Frank H. Buckley, a guest on that episode, agrees but defends the Framers, noting that to say 227 years later we ended up with something they did not like is merely to say they were not omniscient; the Constitution, he says, ran pretty well until fairly recently.
Chris Preble locates the same principle in the constitutional text. He calls the clause vesting war powers in Congress, rather than the executive, the most important clause of the entire document, and says Madison and other founders were “very anxious about the concentration of power in the hands of the executive branch” Chris Preble on Ukraine (2022). Preble adds that the founders did not wish to have large, powerful militaries, citing Washington’s Farewell Address and its warning against “overgrown military establishments,” which Washington called a threat to liberty.
Coercion, public and private
Matt Zwolinski extends the concept beyond government. He agrees with Zadek that the power component in a hypothetical about a dominant business is what gives rise to “a kind of coercion,” and he argues that libertarians err when they worry only about government coercion and force. “There is such a thing as private coercion and force, too,” he says, and libertarians should find it equally troubling Matt Zwolinski on Bleeding Heart Libertarianism (2014). He traces that analysis to Lysander Spooner and to Friedrich Hayek.
Zadek and Zwolinski debate whether government is unique in its use of force. Zadek calls it “the only institution that is permitted to use force,” the only organization we allow to point a gun at us and deprive us of liberty. Zwolinski hesitates to agree that government is the only institution authorized to use force. Both treat market competition as the ordinary check: Zwolinski says corporations usually cannot exert too much power over employees or customers because another company will sweep in with a better deal, though he identifies “cracks” — an economic downturn, or a firm that acquires temporary monopoly power, usually because government has given it to them.
The executive and the stakes of national elections
Buckley argues that technology produced a concentration of power in the executive branch by making a national candidate possible — a Trump or an Obama who could campaign nationally, which the founders never expected after George Washington [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_republic_of_virtue|F.H. Buckley on The Republic of Virtue (2017)]]. He pairs this with a concentration of power in Washington through the expansion of the federal government, particularly after Woodrow Wilson and FDR, which changed the stakes of lobbying: a national interest group is no harder to create than a state one, but the payoff is huge, so lobbyists center on K Street rather than in Delaware.
Zadek restates the point in financial language, calling it “leverage.” If influence can be bought in one office suite on K Street rather than fifty state equivalents, buying votes becomes effective and cheap; dispersing power away from Washington would, as a byproduct, make corruption expensive because one would have to buy votes in fifty places. Buckley is skeptical that simply shrinking the federal government will happen, and proposes curbing corruption instead — including a permanent ban on executive-branch officials working as lobbyists after leaving office, extending a five-year restriction he attributes to Trump.
Zadek makes a parallel argument about federalism and polarization. He says he concluded that the problem lies with the devolution of power from the states to Washington, which raises the stakes of national elections because losing means the other side imposes its political philosophy on you Amy Coney Barrett on Trial (2020). With diffused power at the state level, he says, one can “foot vote” — move — a safety valve he credits to Ilya Somin. He calls concentration of power the word the Founders feared most.
The Supreme Court
Zadek describes a concentration of power in the Supreme Court and, because of its present composition, in one seat on the Court gail_heriot_on_the_significance_of_scalia. He notes that the number of justices is set by Congress, not the Constitution, and has often changed: five in 1801, then seven, then nine, as high as ten and as low as eight, with a failed New Deal attempt to raise it to fifteen. Gail Heriot calls FDR’s proposal “a bald power grab,” recalling that he proposed adding a justice for every justice aged seventy and a half or more, and that it was meant to intimidate; she notes that Justice Roberts changed his vote on New Deal legislation, which Zadek calls “a switch in time that saved nine.” Heriot says a larger Court would reduce, though not eliminate, the single swing justice, but that any expansion would have to be staggered so no president benefits.
Randy Barnett, on a later episode, disputes part of the framing. He says the Supreme Court’s power is the same as it has always been — the power of judgment, to say whether the legislature or executive is acting constitutionally — and that this is the original meaning of the judicial power, not something invented by John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison Amy Coney Barrett on Trial (2020). What has changed, he argues, is the criteria the Court uses: whether it relies on the original meaning of the Constitution or on its own sense of what is proper. He says the Court has made errors in both directions — recognizing rights that may not be rights, and failing to enforce constraints on government — and that he would analogize the Court’s usurpation to the role of “We the People,” not the legislature.
Across episodes
The topic is argued in every episode in the set, and the treatment shifts in emphasis rather than in doctrine. The 2014 episodes locate the danger in private power and in the presidency; the 2016 and 2020 episodes locate it in the Supreme Court, with Heriot and Zadek debating structural fixes and Barnett reframing the problem as one of judicial method rather than judicial power; the 2017 and 2022 episodes return to the executive and to war powers, with Buckley tracing the concentration to technology and federal expansion and Preble tracing it to the erosion of congressional control over war. What changes between the earlier and later treatments is the branch under discussion and the proposed remedy — court size, lobbying restrictions, foot voting — not the underlying premise that concentrated power is the thing to be feared.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not settle whether any of the proposed remedies — enlarging the Court, dispersing federal power, restricting post-government lobbying — would in fact reduce concentration rather than relocate it. They do not provide a definition of “concentration of power” that distinguishes it from ordinary authority, nor do they state a threshold at which power becomes concentrated. The excerpts also do not address how the Founders’ views, as reported by these guests, bear on institutions they did not discuss, such as administrative agencies or state-level concentrations.