Forbes enters The Bob Zadek Show chiefly as a magazine, a ranking and a family name invoked in arguments about markets, taxation and economic growth. The excerpts do not describe the organization’s founding, ownership or editorial operations; they show it being used as a workplace, a data source and a political credential.
Ronald Bailey and the magazine
In the August 27, 2015 episode with Ronald Bailey, the guest recounts that years after being taught in school in the 1970s to believe the leading doom books of the era — Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome and The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich — he was working as a staff writer at Forbes magazine when he noticed that the predicted catastrophe had not arrived. Bailey says he had thought those authors had outlined a future that would be terrible and short, and that twenty years later, at Forbes, he observed that things were better, not worse Ronald Bailey on the End of Doom (2015).
That observation prompted him to reread the books and seek out their authors. He interviewed Paul Ehrlich, who in 1968 had said hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s despite any crash programs embarked upon now; Ehrlich told Bailey he had gotten his timing wrong and that the famines would happen between 2000 and 2010. Bailey also visited the people at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had produced The Limits to Growth, published in 1972, which said the world would be out of oil, natural gas, tin, zinc and a whole bunch of other minerals by the year 2000; one of them eventually conceded that they perhaps overemphasized the material resources side Ronald Bailey on the End of Doom (2015).
Bailey’s conclusion, as he states it, is that environmentalism is not really about science but about a worldview holding that humanity is about to run off a cliff and that top-down centralized government is needed to save people from themselves. Bob Zadek frames this as a political movement dressed up in a faux scientific environmental movement, and Bailey agrees Ronald Bailey on the End of Doom (2015). Forbes appears here only as the vantage point from which Bailey noticed the gap between prediction and outcome.
The Forbes 400 as evidence
In the February 25, 2017 episode with Ed Conard, the Forbes 400 richest Americans serves as a recurring piece of evidence. Conard argues that if crony capitalism were increasing, one would expect an increasingly entrenched status quo; instead he points to faster turnover in Fortune 500 companies, shorter tenures for CEOs, and many more self-made entrepreneurs on the Forbes 400, along with faster turnover on that list Debunking Inequality Myths with Ed Conard (2017).
Conard’s broader claim is that the incomes of the most successful, highest-paid Americans have grown as a percent of GDP over time, and that the question is whether they used crony capitalism to capture an increasing share or delivered value the rest of the economy willingly pays for. He says he shows a lot of evidence that it is far more a market-driven economy, and cites the tech sector: the 15 largest tech companies in the United States in 2000 are worth about 60% of their value today, and without Microsoft would be worth substantially less, having been replaced by a new set of competitors and technologies Debunking Inequality Myths with Ed Conard (2017).
Zadek concedes that crony capitalism is indefensible and the low-hanging fruit of complaints about economic circumstances, while insisting the real subject is the mythology surrounding inequality. He notes that Conard’s book, The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class, does address crony capitalism but that the issue is not crony capitalism Debunking Inequality Myths with Ed Conard (2017). The Forbes 400 functions in the exchange as a measurable proxy for whether the wealthy are entrenched or churning.
Steve Forbes as politician and tax advocate
The October 6, 2018 episode with Stephen Moore treats Steve Forbes as a political and economic figure in his own right. Moore, described by Zadek as one of President Donald Trump’s chief economic advisors and co-author with Arthur Laffer of Trumponomics, says he formed the Committee to Unleash American Prosperity with Arthur Laffer, Larry Kudlow and Stephen Forbes Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018).
Moore calls Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow and Art Laffer economic icons and probably the best economists of the last 50 years, and says Steve Forbes changed the country when he ran for president in 1996. Zadek interjects that this was the first presidential campaign for which he went down to a storefront office and volunteered, and that it broke his heart when Forbes did not survive the primaries Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018).
Moore’s account of the 1996 campaign is that Forbes ran on a reformist free market agenda of term limits, social security personal accounts, a flat tax, no corporate income tax and medical savings accounts — measures Moore says are now boilerplate Republican Party. He tells Forbes that sometimes even when you lose, you can make a big mark in history Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018). The stated purpose of the Committee to Unleash American Prosperity was to educate Republicans so that candidates in 2016 ran on a pro-economic growth, supply-side, lower taxes, less regulation agenda; Moore says they met Trump and teamed up with him, and that Larry Kudlow became the chief economist for Donald Trump Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018).
The corporate income tax and the Forbes precedent
In the December 20, 2020 episode on fiscal policy, Zadek returns to Steve Forbes in a different role — as the last politician to have discussed eliminating the corporate income tax. Zadek argues that when a profit-making enterprise is taxed, the tax becomes a cost like rent or salaries, built into the product, so that corporations never pay taxes and instead pass the cost along; taxing auto companies taxes auto buyers, taxing food companies taxes people who buy food. He says the lowest 25% of earners bear a disproportionately high burden of corporate taxation through the pass-through, and calls the corporate income tax cowardice because it taxes consumers indirectly without telling them Is it too late to step back from the edge of fiscal insanity? (2020).
Chris Edwards agrees, saying there is general agreement among economists of all political persuasions that the corporate tax ultimately lands on lower returns to shareholders, lower wages for workers or higher prices for consumers, and that in a global economy economists increasingly agree the burden mainly lands on workers. He notes that in 2021 the federal government will raise $3.3 trillion in taxes, of which only $120 billion will come from corporations, and that industry is mobile — a semiconductor plant can be set up in Ireland, China, Malaysia or Vietnam, and silicon chips do not have to be made in California or Arizona anymore Is it too late to step back from the edge of fiscal insanity? (2020).
Across episodes: the Forbes name as a marker
The excerpts do not show a developing argument about Forbes as an organization; they show the name recurring in three distinct roles across three episodes. In 2015 Ronald Bailey’s time as a staff writer at Forbes magazine supplies the vantage point from which he noticed that decades of doom predictions had failed. In 2017 Ed Conard cites the Forbes 400 as evidence of turnover and self-made wealth against the crony-capitalism thesis. In 2018 and 2020 Steve Forbes appears personally — first as the 1996 candidate whose flat-tax and personal-accounts platform Stephen Moore says became Republican boilerplate, then as the last politician Bob Zadek credits with raising elimination of the corporate income tax. What changes between the earlier and later treatments is the register: the magazine as workplace and data source gives way to the man as political precedent, with Zadek and Moore each supplying a personal recollection of the 1996 campaign.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts say nothing about Forbes’s founding, ownership, editorial leadership, circulation or business history, and nothing about the magazine’s own politics beyond its use as a setting and a ranking. They do not state the date of Steve Forbes’s presidential campaign beyond the year 1996, the outcome of the primaries beyond Zadek’s recollection that Forbes did not survive them, or the fate of the flat tax and other planks Moore lists. No excerpt describes the Forbes 400’s methodology, and none states what became of the Committee to Unleash American Prosperity after the 2016 election.