The Fraser Institute is a Canadian organization associated with an economic freedom index. In the excerpts from The Bob Zadek Show, it is named only in passing — as the source of a ranking, as one of the indices of property rights and economic freedom, and as an affiliation held by a guest — and never as the subject of discussion.
Venezuela’s ranking
In the April 23, 2017 episode on Venezuela, Fergus Hodgson called the Fraser Institute’s ranking of economic freedom his favorite comparison between capitalism and socialism. He described it as a ranking of economic freedom from the Fraser Institute in Canada, and said that Venezuela ranked 159th and was the absolute lowest in the world among those countries that can be ranked and that have data available Venezuela on the Brink with Fergus Hodgson (2017).
The ranking was offered as the data point in a broader argument Hodgson was making about policy outcomes in Venezuela. He attributed the country’s condition to Marxist ideology rather than to circumstance, saying that a certain portion of people were motivated both by their own quest for power and by Marxist ideology, and that this was not limited or exclusive to Venezuela. He said there had been an infiltration of Venezuela by Marxist ideologues for a long time, particularly from Cuba, and that there were thousands of Cuban agents in Venezuela advising and supporting the regime. He also said that Nicolás Maduro, the president, had a chief advisor who had worked with Che Guevara in Cuba during the Cuban Revolution Venezuela on the Brink with Fergus Hodgson (2017).
Hodgson described the economic situation in concrete terms: hyperinflation had been reached, and an average salary there would be about $30 per month. He said the Supreme Court of Justice had already annulled the parliament, so that the country was basically a dictatorship, though he added that it had already been a dictatorship before that. He traced the country’s earlier trajectory — oil discovered and utilized in the early part of the 20th century, a flowering that made the country one of the wealthiest in the region and brought first-world levels of development, and a transition to democracy in the late 1950s — and identified the resource curse as the problem: countries that become too dependent on one particular element of the economy tend to have more corruption and greater political instability. Since the 1958 transition, he said, there had been a growth in a redistributionist or socialist state and a growing class division, with instability culminating in the 1990s in two coup attempts led by Hugo Chávez, who went to prison, was later pardoned, and then ran for president as an anti-establishment candidate. Hodgson said Chávez was a student of Fidel Castro and imported that ideology and approach to Venezuela, and that over the last 17 or 18 years he and his successor, Maduro, had been converting Venezuela into a socialist basket case Venezuela on the Brink with Fergus Hodgson (2017).
Property rights and the welfare state
In the July 16, 2017 episode with Will Wilkinson, the Fraser Institute appeared as one of the sources of indices of the integrity of property rights in different countries. Wilkinson said that the integrity of property rights is part of the Fraser Institute or Heritage’s economic freedom index, and that countries with high tax rates and big welfare states do really, really well on the property rights dimensions. He acknowledged this might seem counterintuitive to anyone who feels taxation is necessarily a violation of property rights, and said it means these countries understand the importance of property rights in an economic system and are extremely good about protecting them generally — the government does not just take property, there is not a lot of eminent domain, and there are good judicial procedures for ensuring that people can defend their property claims Will Wilkinson: G.O.P. Should Embrace the Welfare State (2017).
Wilkinson was answering Bob Zadek’s question about political danger. Zadek had asked whether opening the floodgates to provide a negative income tax or a minimum guaranteed income would start a process by which the guarantee increases and increases, comparing the fear to a value-added tax, which he described as a stealth tax that keeps increasing in Europe, and asking whether the process of wealth transfer would end up being destructive because there is no ideal level and it is very hard, as with Obamacare, to undo or modulate the amount of wealth transfer once it starts Will Wilkinson: G.O.P. Should Embrace the Welfare State (2017).
Wilkinson said the question is best answered by looking at the data and the evidence of what happens in other countries. He said it is just not the case that places that end up spending a lot on the welfare state go down the road to serfdom, and that these places are some of the freest places in the world. He gave Canada as an example: it famously has socialized healthcare, a single-payer system in which the state finances most of the healthcare spending, which is very expensive, and so Canada takes a pretty big hit in the economic freedom index for that expenditure, since taxes have to be higher and the government has to spend a higher percentage of GDP to sustain that kind of system. Nevertheless, he said, Canada comes out higher than the United States in terms of economic freedom. He said that this one policy does not make such places socialist overall, and that many places with single-payer healthcare systems or other kinds of government finance for healthcare do extremely well on other dimensions of economic freedom and on overall measures of personal freedom. He cited Cato’s personal freedom index, which combines their economic freedom index with something they call the personal freedom index, including rule of law, freedom of assembly, safety and security, and said a lot of places with very big governments that spend a lot on the safety net, that might even have socialized healthcare, are right at the top of Cato’s personal freedom index Will Wilkinson: G.O.P. Should Embrace the Welfare State (2017).
Art Carden’s affiliation
In the May 2, 2022 episode on price theory, Bob Zadek introduced Art Carden as a professor of economics at Samford University’s Brock School of Business and a senior fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research and at the Fraser Institute. Zadek said he had asked Carden to join the show to explain the role of price, and that Carden had written an essay on price that made everything so clear. Zadek described Carden as a professor of economics at Samford University and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, and said Carden was there to help explain the role of price and free markets in our lives and how without it, neither our economic system nor any other economic system on earth can possibly function Art Carden on Price Theory & Its Discontents (2022).
The episode’s framing, in Zadek’s opening monologue, was that prices are the most accurate form of information for coordinating human action, and that government interventions like rent control, minimum wage, and price gouging laws distort these signals, leading to waste, shortages, and unintended social consequences. Zadek called price the purest and most ultimate truth if it is the result of a free market, and the most small-d democratic way for every participant in a market society — from the spender living on the tightest budget on the planet to the billionaire — to participate in a market economy. He compared buying and selling to voting, saying the vote we exercise hundreds of times a day is the vote we use when we buy or sell anything, and that the more pure price information we have, the purer our economic democracy is Art Carden on Price Theory & Its Discontents (2022).
Across episodes
The Fraser Institute is invoked in three episodes across five years, and the excerpts show no development in how it is treated: Hodgson cites its ranking of economic freedom as evidence about Venezuela, Wilkinson cites its property-rights index as part of an argument that big welfare states are compatible with freedom, and Zadek cites Carden’s senior fellowship there in an introduction. In each case the institute functions as a source of measurement or an affiliation, not as a subject; no speaker in these excerpts describes its founding, its funding, its methodology, or its personnel beyond Carden’s fellowship.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the Fraser Institute was founded, where it is based beyond Hodgson’s reference to Canada, how its index is constructed, or how many countries it ranks. They do not say who leads it or how it is funded. They contain no discussion of criticism of the institute or of its rankings, and no guest addresses it directly rather than citing it in passing.