Overview
Across four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, Keynesian economics is discussed as a school of thought that assigns government a central role in directing the economy. Bob Zadek describes it as looking upon government as the key player in the economic system rather than the regulator, and characterizes it as driven by a political motive first, serving as an economic rationale for what is really a political goal. Stephen Moore states that roughly 75% of economists today, especially those trained at Ivy League schools, have been taught Keynesian economics, and he calls the last 60 years an experiment in Keynesian economics that was a failure. Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018)
Moore’s central claim is that government does not create jobs and is a net destroyer of jobs, with all jobs and all wealth coming from the private sector. He argues that a government worker can only have a job if there is a private sector worker to support him or her. In his account, the Obama administration put every single idea of Keynesian economics to the test: massive federal borrowing of $10 trillion, an $800 billion fiscal stimulus bill with spending for shovel-ready projects, Obamacare, minimum wage increases, tax increases on the rich, and the Fed flooding the economy with cheap dollars. Moore says this produced the weakest recovery from a recession since the Great Depression. Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018)
Zadek offers a distinct framing of the same period. He argues that when Obama said his policies worked, the disagreement was really about what the goal of the policy was. In Zadek’s view, Obama’s policies did work, but the goal was not economic success; it was some political goal, and Obama’s goals worked perfectly. He says that when somebody says policies work, one has to ask: work towards what end? Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018)
The Obama recovery and its critics
Moore acknowledges that there was a recovery under Obama, noting that 2007 and 2008 saw one of the worst crashes since the Great Depression and that Obama entered office during it. He says there are natural healing powers of the economy and that it was going to get fixed one way or the other. He notes it had been over 100 months since a recession, one of the longest stretches in history. But he argues the recovery was long and durable yet really anemic and flat, with not much growth. He cites a chapter in his book showing that a Reagan-style recovery rather than the Obama recovery would have produced about $3 trillion more output by 2016, which he describes as Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana combined, their annual output that was missing. Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018)
Moore also points to regional variation. He says areas of California such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Los Angeles did very well, but Middle America—states like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and West Virginia—had no recovery at all, and those were the voters Trump spoke to. He says that since the election, one million manufacturing, mining, and construction jobs were created. Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018)
Zadek pushes back on the idea that Obama’s program worked but was anemic. He compares it to the bloodletting that killed George Washington: some people survived bloodletting and got better anyway, but that does not mean bloodletting was a good idea. In Zadek’s analogy, the economy is so strong it even survived Obama; Obama gets no credit for turning the economy around, only for delaying the recovery. Moore agrees, citing an Obama economics team report from February 2009 that estimated the path of recovery if the economy were left to heal on its own versus with an $800 billion stimulus. Moore says the economy recovered more slowly than the estimate for doing nothing, so by Obama’s own numbers the country would have done better without spending the $800 billion. Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018)
Economists, politicians, and the science question
In a later episode, Thomas DiLorenzo describes a symbiotic relationship between many economists and politicians, saying a lot of economists work at providing plausible rationales for bigger government, more taxes, more interventionism, more control, and more socialism. He cites Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary who taught economics at Harvard and was its president, going on CNN and attributing inflation to the January 6th protests in Washington, D.C. DiLorenzo calls Summers a poster boy for an economic prostitute. He also cites Paul Krugman, who taught economics at Princeton for many years, saying on CNN that the country was not in a recession even though the Commerce Department had said real GDP fell for six months in a row, which DiLorenzo says fits the textbook definition. Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
DiLorenzo argues that beginning in the 1930s, economists began to understand there was more money to be made and more prestige in being in charge of a government agency or advising a governor or president than in standing before a classroom of undergraduates, and so they became much more interventionist-minded out of their own self-interest. Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
Zadek connects this to the COVID period, saying that no matter what one advocated as the best governmental response to COVID, if one was in government one defended the conclusion by saying that is what the scientists taught. He says it sounds like those who follow Keynesian economists would say they are just following the science, and that it is a battle between competing opinions of different scientists, each defending their opinion not on a political observation but on how they interpret the data. Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
Voter competence and economic policy
In a 2019 episode, Zadek uses the 2008 election as his best example of voter incompetence on complex issues. He says the country was in the economic pits in 2008 and Obama was running promising to fix the economic doldrums, so in effect the vote was on whether Keynesian economics or free-market economics was the right solution. He asks how a voter could make that decision or learn the economics necessary, calling it an insane standard by which voters should select a president. Randall G. Holcombe on Liberty in Peril (2019)
In a 2022 episode, Zadek extends the argument to polling, saying that to ask the public in a poll about relationships in Afghanistan, Taiwan, or inflation tools is utterly insane because no participant has studied the issue. He argues that a poll is not the collective opinion of America but the collective opinion of Americans who have formed their opinion based upon the media they listen to, making it a poll testing the media rather than the public. Dick Morris on the 2022 and 2024 Elections (2022)
John Giadjopoulos agrees and adds that if one polled people on their belief system stripped of current events—asking not whether they believe in Austrian or Keynesian economics but whether the government should tell them how to run their private business—the largest identifiable group in the United States is libertarian. He says they believe in maximum freedom and view government only as an umpire to enforce laws. Dick Morris on the 2022 and 2024 Elections (2022)
Across episodes
The topic appears in four episodes spanning 2018 to 2022. In the two 2018 segments with Stephen Moore, Keynesian economics is treated as a failed experiment whose Obama-era test produced weak recovery, with Moore and Zadek debating whether the recovery happened despite or because of it. In the 2019 episode with Randall G. Holcombe, Zadek reframes the 2008 election as a referendum on Keynesian versus free-market economics that voters could not competently decide. In the 2022 episode with Thomas DiLorenzo, the focus shifts from policy outcomes to the incentive structure of economists themselves, describing a symbiotic relationship between Keynesian economists and politicians. In the 2022 episode with Dick Morris and John Giadjopoulos, Keynesian economics appears only as a contrast to Austrian economics in a discussion of polling and voter belief systems. The excerpts show no single developed argument across episodes but rather a consistent framing of Keynesian economics as the interventionist foil to free-market alternatives.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not provide a definition of Keynesian economics in its own terms, nor do they name Keynes himself or any of his works. They do not describe the mechanisms of fiscal or monetary policy beyond the specific Obama-era measures Moore lists. The excerpts do not state the outcome of any election or the content of any bill beyond the $800 billion stimulus figure. They also do not present any guest defending Keynesian economics on its merits; the doctrine is discussed only through its critics.