On The Bob Zadek Show, “redistribution of wealth” is treated as a term of art rather than a neutral description of fiscal policy. Bob Zadek defines it as the government deciding that some person or group deserves your money or property more than you do, taking your property away and giving it to somebody else because of the government’s worldview; he calls it one of the most sinister, offensive and obnoxious items of governmental policy Worst Ten Economic Mistakes of the 20th Century (2014). The concept recurs across the show’s run in three registers: as a cultural byproduct of the entertainment industry, as a covert feature of government operations, and as a dispute about who spends money better.
The cultural account: Hollywood and the “less fortunate”
Ben Shapiro, interviewed about his book Primetime Propaganda: The True Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, told Zadek that he interviewed somewhere between 75 and 100 people in Hollywood, most of them major names, and released tapes of them talking Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011). Shapiro said most of the people who work in television are socialists who are uncomfortable with the money they make, and that they resolve the discomfort by telling each other that at least they stand up for the downtrodden. He gave the union scale for writing a network television show as $30,000 per episode, which he said comes to $660,000 for a 22-episode season of comedy, leaving aside residuals that he said would bring in another several hundred thousand dollars.
Shapiro singled out the phrase “less fortunate” as pernicious, because in his account it assumes that no skill or effort goes into making someone successful and that success is luck of the draw. From that premise, he said, the general tendency is that government must rectify the luck of the draw and everybody has to have an equal outcome. He said the attitude pervades Hollywood because every waiter has a script, so those who make it tend to think luck was involved and therefore stump for a socialistic redistribution of wealth or at least heavy regulation of the corporate types who made them rich in the first place. Zadek agreed, recounting that he had gone off on a mini-rant the previous Sunday against the same phrase and said that if he qualifies as successful, the last thing he would attribute it to is being fortunate, since he worked hard for about 50 years.
Shapiro also argued that class mobility distinguishes the United States from other countries: smart people, no matter where they are born on the economic rungs, tend to rise, and stupid people tend to fall, which he said studies show. He said that if you looked in a vacuum and took away the income question, the people who are more fortunate in terms of actual luck are those who get welfare benefits, special dispensations for college scholarships and handouts, as opposed to those who pay higher tax rates and are forced through regulation to discard their own wealth. Zadek raised the specter of “movie stamps” as a parallel to food stamps; Shapiro said the idea was not far off, describing a corrupt relationship in which Hollywood acts as the PR firm for the Democratic Party and the Democrats hand cash back, and noting that the cable industry is extraordinarily regulated, with local markets generally having only one or two cable companies forced to do certain things on behalf of local politicians to be accredited to broadcast. He predicted subsidies to studios that are going under, after the pattern of subsidies to newspapers, on the grounds that the industry is too big to fail.
Covert redistribution and the Government Cost Calculator
Burton Abrams, introduced as a professor of economics at the University of Delaware and a research fellow at the Independent Institute, appeared to discuss his book The Terrible 10: A Century of Economic Folly, which Zadek described as a list of the ten worst economic mistakes of the 20th century Worst Ten Economic Mistakes of the 20th Century (2014). Abrams directs the Institute’s Government Cost Calculator at mygovcost.org, which he said allows a user to calculate likely tax liabilities given expected lifetime income and what benefits the user might get, and whether the user is losing or winning — most people, he said, are losing. Abrams credited his predecessors at the Institute with the hard work of building the calculator and said there is a lot of redistribution that goes on in very covert ways, which he thought the calculator could improve on over time.
Zadek said the show would discuss those covert methods by which government redistributes wealth, and restated his definition: the government making a decision that somebody or a group deserves your money or property more than you do. He said redistribution means taking from A to give to B. The excerpt of the episode ends at that point, before the discussion of the list itself.
Who spends better: owners or the political process
In a later episode, Zadek framed redistribution as a judgment about who can make the best spending decisions on how money is used: the owner of the money or the government The Economist’s View of the World (2022). He posed the question in terms of economic growth — starting with a pot of money about to be taken away from the top fraction of earners, is the owner able to make the best economic decisions about furthering the common good, or is government, and who should spend the money for the benefit of all: the political process or somebody driven by making more money, which means investing it wisely. He noted that redistribution of wealth has much of the public’s support and that his guest had spent considerable time on it in an updated edition because it is much more a dominant part of government operations than when the first edition was written.
Steven E. Rhoads agreed that this was a very good argument and turned to Deirdre McCloskey’s work, which he said holds that in 1800 versus now the average median person has 23 times as much real wealth as in 1800. He contrasted the lack of competition in 1820, when a company store and a 15-mile horse ride to the next town left a buyer with little choice, with the present, where a person can sit at a computer and get competition from all kinds of middle people such as Walmart and Amazon working around the clock. He attributed the change to rich people investing their money in products that turned out to be very helpful, including easier transportation.
Rhoads cited a Georgetown survey conducted six or eight years earlier that asked about confidence in 20 institutions — churches, charitable organizations, business, big business, small business, Congress, the President, foundations, hospitals. The military ranked first, Amazon second, Google third, Congress last, and the President 18th out of 20. Rhoads drew the inference that ordinary people have no confidence that Congress will spend money right, yet still vote for more help with medical stuff, food and gas because they like the sound of it. He said businessmen asked whom they would put in charge of a business they invested in chose Jeff Bezos, and that Seattle tried to put a special tax on Bezos’s employees and he said he would move, after which the city council changed its mind — which Rhoads offered as an advantage of private property, that you can only abuse owners so much before they fight back. He invoked Madison in the Federalist Papers on division of power protecting the rich, on the ground that if the poor take everything away there is no innovation.
Across episodes: no development
The topic appears in the 2011 episode with Ben Shapiro, the 2014 episode with Burton Abrams, and the 2022 episode with Steven E. Rhoads; the excerpts show the same definition and the same underlying question — whether government or the property owner should decide how money is spent — argued in each, with no development between the earlier and later treatment that the excerpts record.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state what specific statutes, programs or cases the speakers had in mind when they described covert redistribution, nor do they give the contents of Abrams’s list beyond the mention of Prohibition, the Federal Reserve, Social Security and Medicare in the episode summary. The 2014 excerpt breaks off before the discussion of the list, so the reasoning behind those items is not available. The 2022 excerpt likewise ends mid-conversation, and the 2011 excerpt ends at a station break.