Farm subsidies as wealth transfers
In a discussion of agricultural policy, Bob Zadek described the history of corporate welfare as beginning modestly with FDR in the Agricultural Adjustment Act, 1933, as a way to pay farmers to take land out of production to reduce overproduction so that farmers could make a living. He noted that the Secretary of Agriculture in 1933 called it a temporary program to get the country over a hump, and that 60 years later it had grown to $25 billion. Zadek said the programs help Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and the huge corporate growers, and he characterized the whole range of programs as wealth transfers to corporate farmers. Farming Subsidies (2011)
Chris Edwards said policymakers rarely have to stand up and defend these programs because they are passed by the Senate Agriculture Committee and the House Agriculture Committee, which are dominated by members who often own farms themselves or come from rural communities. He said the politicians always claim they are standing up for the small-time farmer, but that three-quarters of all farm subsidies go to the 10% largest farms. Farming Subsidies (2011)
The moral and social case against redistribution
David Boaz told Zadek there is a moral problem with taking money from people by force and giving it to other people, and also a social problem created when people get on government programs and are able to stay for years and decades. He said that is not a very satisfying life, and that the question should be how to get people better lives rather than how to get people welfare. He argued a robust, stronger market economy would be better for everybody, especially those who have not been able to find jobs or good jobs, along with a system of charity that would be bigger if people had more money in their pockets to give. David Boaz on The Libertarian Mind (2015)
Boaz said the difference between charity and government is that people engaged in charity are usually more local, more decentralized, more focused on the individual families they are dealing with, and more focused on helping people get their lives together rather than simply giving them money. Using foreign aid as an example, he said the instinct to send money and food to starving people is noble, but that it would be better if the people of Africa did not need baskets of food sent from the United States; what Africa needs, he said, is free markets, private property, the rule of law, and systems that allow people to work and produce and trade. He added that if the government is rapacious and takes most of what you produce, there is no point in fishing. David Boaz on The Libertarian Mind (2015)
Zadek framed the disagreement as one over method rather than concern: liberals and progressives do not own the issue of caring for others, and the question is how to fix what everybody concedes we owe to others to fix — giving a hungry person a fish or a fishing rod. David Boaz on The Libertarian Mind (2015)
Trade, jobs and salaries
In a discussion of trade, Zadek argued that activity trying to protect jobs does not save the job but the salary, because every job lost in America could be saved if American workers would be willing to work at the same salary as a foreign worker. He said there is no such thing as “my job”; you only have a job if somebody has decided you are worth what you want. Trump’s War on Trade (2019)
Don Boudreau agreed and said jobs are not things owned by someone; a job is a service performed for someone who chooses to buy something, and that person is under no moral or economic obligation to continue buying it. He said Americans could still be making low-value toys and low-value textiles if they were willing to be paid the low wages paid to produce those things, and that it is a good thing they are not willing. He said Americans lose jobs when their wages rise, and that this is a good thing, because it moves them into producing things that are more productive and will eventually pay higher wages. Trump’s War on Trade (2019)
Voluntary versus political transfers
Zadek told listeners that high-net-worth individuals give substantial portions of their money to charities and organizations they favor, and that although they pick the organizations, they accomplish voluntarily what economics calls wealth transfers. He cited Bill and Melinda Gates, who formed foundations and give away large sums through the Gates Foundation for world health, as an example of a voluntary wealth transfer. He said the fight with figures such as Elizabeth Warren who want to “soak the rich” is not about whether there should be a wealth transfer but about who decides who gets the money — the person who earned it, or governments acting through the political process rather than through a process based upon need or efficiency. The Flight of the Golden Geese (2020)
David Lesperance recounted meeting Chuck Feeney, a founder of Duty Free, who gave away all of his money at an early age and directed the spending of it, with an enormous impact on Ireland that would have been gone in half a day had the money gone into tax revenue. Lesperance said Feeney finished giving away the last of his money through the Atlantic Philanthropies, and that this was the inspiration for the Giving Pledge, which Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and many others signed. He said the Giving Pledge got a lot more support than the so-called Buffett Rule, an increase in current taxation, because it was about control over strategic philanthropy. The Flight of the Golden Geese (2020)
Lesperance said his clients have no problem paying for services they use or could have used but chose not to, and paying for some others, but that there is a limit; at some point they say they are going to look at it as charity. He said that if you look coldly at government activities and want to deal with a particular social ill, such as early childhood education, it is not a terribly effective or efficient manner in which to deal with that societal ill. He said Bill and Melinda Gates had more impact on the eradication of malaria in a decade and a half than all the previous world governments had had since the discovery that a mosquito was a vector for malaria a hundred years before. The Flight of the Golden Geese (2020)
Buying peace and the middle of the distribution
Zadek offered a reading of the case for wealth transfers: if the only goal were to improve the quality of life for everyone, then the more efficiency and the more free market the better, but it results in a lot of people left behind economically, whether because of their own failings or circumstances or accident of birth. As that number grows, he said, society becomes more vulnerable and more fragile, people are angry and have no stake in the system, and wealth transfers are done not to correct an imperfection but so that there is not a growing class of people unhappy enough to cause unrest — buying peace in a good way. He said democracy is threatened by the unhappiness of people who feel there is nothing they can do to catch up. When More is Not Better (2021)
Roger L. Martin responded that Zadek emphasized that more than he would, and that he does not think people want to catch up; the goal is just having a better future, and when people stop feeling there is a chance for a better future, that is when they become unruly. He said he is much more obsessed about the band around the median than about the tail of the distribution, and that a good society is one in which willingly those who have more help those who have less, but that the trigger for America is when the middle of the distribution gives up. When More is Not Better (2021)
Tax collection and the direction of spending
Zadek said one of the most dishonest statements about the 87,000 new tax collectors is that this is nothing other than a tax increase, and that the public has been deceived to think “tax increase” means what percentage tax rate is in the statute. He said what people care about is how much taxes they pay, and that any way you slice it people will be paying more than they pay now, whether because a deduction is disallowed or a rate is raised. He said this is a tax increase dressed up as getting people to pay their fair share, and that it transfers wealth from the private sector to the government. Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
Zadek asked who should decide how a dollar is spent: government, which makes decisions based upon politics, or 300 million Americans making private decisions that collectively dictate how the economy goes. Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
Thomas DiLorenzo said Biden’s top economic advisor claimed on television that if more taxes are collected, ordinary people will spend less and inflation will be reduced, but that the same money goes to the government and will be spent by the government, which will increase inflation. He said that in the private sector a business that serves its customers better makes money and one that serves them poorly loses money, while in government failure is financial success, because the worse government does at educating children or getting people out of poverty, the more tax dollars it takes by saying the failure was due to lack of money. Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
DiLorenzo said that if you take a million dollars out of the private sector for a jobs program to create government jobs, it is not unusual for ten times a $30,000 salary to be spent on bureaucracy and paperwork to provide one such job. He recounted a student who worked with a charity that received a $100,000 grant from the state of Maryland to provide employment for Russian refugees; the charity found one woman a part-time 20-hour-a-week secretary job, while about 30 people enjoyed a nice lunch at an expensive restaurant at taxpayer expense. He said transferring money from the private sector to the government sector impoverishes us always and in every way. Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
Across episodes
The topic recurs across the excerpts, but the treatment does not develop along a single line. The 2011 farming episode treats subsidies as transfers to corporate farmers; the 2015 Boaz episode treats redistribution as a moral and social problem and contrasts it with decentralized charity; the 2019 trade episode reframes job protection as salary protection; the 2020 episode distinguishes voluntary philanthropic transfers from political ones and asks who decides; the 2021 episode presents wealth transfers as buying peace and locates the political trigger in the middle of the distribution; and the 2022 episode treats tax collection as a transfer from the private sector to government. The later episodes add the voluntary-transfer contrast and the question of who decides, but the excerpts show no single argument advanced and then revised by the same participant across episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the state in which any city mentioned is located, the full name or legislative history of the 2022 tax-collection provision, or what any court held about the programs discussed. They do not give the founding date or full text of the Giving Pledge, the size of the Gates Foundation’s giving, or the outcome of the Buffett Rule proposal. Where an excerpt ends mid-sentence or mid-thought, the record stops there.