Growth as the product of free people
In the excerpts, economic growth is treated as an outcome of freedom rather than a goal to be administered. John Tamny argues that when people are free, economic growth is abundant, and he illustrates the claim with a historical comparison: as recently as the 1940s the biggest expense for hospitals was bedsheets and bandages, while subsequent economic growth, matched with scientists working toward cures, allowed hospitals and doctors to elongate lives. Tamny’s larger claim is that freedom produces both the resources and the information needed to answer a threat, and that those who refuse to change their behavior in a crisis supply information just as those who take precautions do. John Tamny on Experts vs. the Wisdom of Markets (2020)
Bob Zadek frames the same theme in tax policy. He calls growth a word that is abhorred these days and no longer regarded by many people as a legitimate goal in itself, and he answers that economic growth gives us a better, healthier and happier standard of living, that somebody has to invent the stuff that makes life better, and that this is growth. He invokes the core principle of taxation—the more you tax something, the less you have of it—and reasons that the more income is taxed, the less income is produced; since the money to hire people comes out of earnings, a life without income would be a life without growth. What the IRS’s Hiring Spree Means for You (2023)
Zadek also supplies a periodization. He says the country enjoyed sustained economic growth in the period after the Civil War and until the income tax, and in the first few years after the income tax, and that it never enjoyed such sustained growth except perhaps in a period after World War II. He presents this as evidence that imagined prosperity without an income tax is not an absurdity, because the country managed economic growth—meaning a better standard of living and longer life expectancy—without one. Beware, the tax man cometh (2023)
Immigration, population and the size of the economy
Alex Nowrasteh gives the most concrete growth estimate in the excerpts. Taking the extreme example of deporting all illegal immigrants, and setting aside any government costs, he says that would shrink the size of the US economy by about 5% initially and make it more difficult to grow after that. He adds that decreasing the supply of high-skilled workers would reduce growth in high-skilled industries, and that this cuts against the stated goal of increasing US economic growth to 4% per year. Alex Nowrasteh: How Prop. 187 Turned California Blue (2016)
On Nowrasteh’s account, reaching 4% growth is virtually impossible without a rapidly growing population of workers and consumers, and the best way to get one is to increase immigration rather than decrease it. He identifies enforcement procedures as an additional drag, since they cost tax dollars that must come from other programs, increased taxation or increased debt. He also describes businesses losing their customer bases to deportation and then being unable to hire, buy capital goods or sell what they produce, so that they must let other workers go. His conclusion is that there is no path to prosperity by decreasing the supply of people in the country, and that it makes almost all of us a little poorer and in the long run makes all of us poorer. Alex Nowrasteh: How Prop. 187 Turned California Blue (2016)
Asked by Zadek who benefits, Nowrasteh names two groups: guaranteed beneficiaries, meaning the government employees who carry out the orders and the government unions representing them, along with private prison corporations and other government contractors; and a speculative group, Americans 25 or older without a high school degree, some of whom might see moderate nominal wage increases of about 3% to 8% depending on the estimates. He puts that population at 8% to 9% of the entire US population and says every other group of workers would lose, with the losers making up about 91% to 92%. Alex Nowrasteh: How Prop. 187 Turned California Blue (2016)
Zadek connects the exchange to Frédéric Bastiat, described as an economic philosopher of the middle of the 19th century, and to the concept of the unseen: the small benefits are seen and visible while the profound detriments are dispersed and invisible, so that a shopper will not attribute four cents on apples to immigration policy. Zadek says the overwhelming majority paying through higher taxes and higher cost of goods will not know the policy caused it, and Nowrasteh agrees and extends the unseen effects to businesses losing customers. Alex Nowrasteh: How Prop. 187 Turned California Blue (2016)
Free cities and zone-based reform
Mark Lutter defines a free city as a city with substantial legal autonomy from a host country or an independent city-state, and names Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai and Shenzhen as modern examples. The point is one of political economy: national-level reforms are difficult because interest groups must be assembled into coalitions, whereas a free city, especially on relatively unoccupied Greenfield land, can achieve deeper reforms because special interest groups have no vested interest in the site. The result, in his telling, is a strategy to implement the reforms that lead to relatively free markets and a good governance system with little corruption, attracting the investment and creating the jobs needed for economic development. The End of Nation-States? (2018)
Lutter’s central historical example is China. He says China designated Shenzhen a special economic zone in 1980, when it was a fishing village of 30,000 residents, and that it now has about 18 million residents depending on how the metropolitan area is defined, making it the manufacturing capital of the world and a crucial part of China’s economic growth. He says China has lifted about 800 million people out of poverty over the last 40 years largely through this strategy of zone-based reforms, because the reforms could not have been passed at the national level; the country identified backwaters on key trading routes, implemented reforms there, and spread them once they succeeded. He presents the model as replicable in low and middle-income countries, for example in Africa and Latin America, to create the legal environment and governance system that can generate economic growth and alleviate poverty. The End of Nation-States? (2018)
Distribution, stagnation and inequality
One episode turns to how growth is distributed. The guest’s segment states that since about 1976, since the bicentennial, median incomes have almost entirely flatlined and the economic growth in the country is going to the extremely well-to-do, a pattern described as a Pareto distribution by people who study these technical things. On this account the median American family can no longer say that its children are likely to be twice as well-off as it is, which had been the case leading up to 1976, when median income doubled every 30 years. When More is Not Better (2021)
The excerpts treat inequality as a distinct subject from growth itself. Bob Zadek interviews economist and author Ed Conard about the causes and misconceptions surrounding economic inequality, with the discussion covering how market forces, regulation and immigration policies affect the middle class, and why the success of top earners is often a driver of broader economic growth rather than a hindrance to it; the listed topics run from income inequality and crony capitalism to market economy, government regulation, immigration policy, social mobility and economic growth. The excerpt does not carry the argument itself, only the framing of the episode. Debunking Inequality Myths with Ed Conard (2017)
Across episodes: the same question, restated
The excerpts show no development of the topic across episodes; they restate a single position in different registers. In the earlier treatment, Nowrasteh supplies the mechanism and the numbers—deportation shrinking the economy by about 5%, the 4% target, the 3% to 8% wage range, the 8% to 9% of potential beneficiaries—while Zadek supplies Bastiat’s unseen. Alex Nowrasteh: How Prop. 187 Turned California Blue (2016) In the later tax episodes, Zadek supplies the mechanism instead, moving from the taxation principle to the claim that the period after the Civil War and until the income tax was one of sustained growth, a formulation he repeats nearly verbatim in the two January 2023 episodes. Beware, the tax man cometh (2023) Lutter’s contribution, in the 2018 episode, shifts the unit of analysis from the nation to the city and from restriction to reform, but the underlying claim—that growth follows the freer movement of people, capital and reform—is the one Nowrasteh states for immigration. The End of Nation-States? (2018)
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not supply a definition of economic growth as a measured quantity, nor do they state growth rates for any period other than the 4% target Nowrasteh attributes to Trump and the doubled-median-income figure for the years before 1976. The January 2023 episodes end their discussion at the point where Ashley Varner is labeled as a speaker, so her account of the union’s political donations and the 87,000 agents stands outside the growth argument here. The 2017 Conard episode provides only a summary of topics and speakers, so none of its reasoning can be attributed. Prop 187 itself is named in the title of the Nowrasteh episode, but the excerpt breaks off before the section on it begins.