Sugar subsidies and the Everglades
In a discussion of the domestic sugar program, Bob Zadek said the American Congress loves the very small, controlled-by-a-few-families domestic sugar industry and protects it, with production mostly in Florida, consuming and destroying the Everglades. He attributed to the industry the claim that the program keeps sugar jobs domestically and does not cost taxpayers a dime, and called the industry’s representatives liars. He cited statistics that preserving one domestic sugar job costs $826,000, and said that by Congress artificially inflating the cost of domestic sugar, candy manufacturers are chased to Canada and Mexico, causing a loss in the last couple of years of 10,000 candy manufacturing jobs. He named Hershey’s and Brach’s among the manufacturers chased abroad. Zadek said Congress does this because it gets massive political contributions from the domestic sugar industry, that the farm subsidy program is driven by politics with no sensible public policy purpose, and that everybody is hurt by farm subsidies. He added that wherever a listener lives and however they vote, they have voted for a congressman or a senator who supports this obscenity, and that they should be kicked out of Congress. Farming Subsidies (2011)
The first immigration law and the 1882 restriction
Asked by Zadek whether the period from the founding through the 1880s amounted to truly open borders, Alex Nowrasteh agreed. He said the first immigration and naturalization law passed by the US Congress was in 1790, that it was one paragraph long, and that it had zero restrictions on immigration and did not even mention it. In his account the idea was that anybody could come, with no inspections and no quotas; the only provision was that a person had to reside in the US for two years before becoming a citizen. He said that through the 1850s, ’60s and ’70s only a handful of laws passed that did little to restrict immigration, and that in the 1860s the government went to the other extreme and subsidized immigration, including advertising immigration in Europe to attract more people — a policy he said he does not agree with. What changed in the 1880s, he said, was that the government put in place the first quotas and limitations based on nationality, in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which he believed passed in the first week of May 1882 and which barred the immigration of Chinese into the United States. He described it as the first big restriction, pushed by union interests on the West Coast, where many Chinese, especially in the Bay Area, were working in cigar manufacturing. He named Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor’s cigar union in that part of the country and himself an immigrant from the United Kingdom, as pushing for a ban because he thought Chinese immigrants competed too much with the white workers in cigar and cigarette manufacturing in the Bay Area. Let Them All In (2013)
The Tenth Amendment and powers never ceded
Zadek singled out the phrase “or to the people” in the Tenth Amendment as one of the most important, reading it to mean that a large swath of rights stays with the individual and that the people have not lost very much of their rights under the document. In his framing the document reminds us that Congress does not have the power to take power from the people except for a stingy list of powers given to Washington, and that the phrase should be recited every morning as a reminder to government that it lacks the power to do this. He said the Supreme Court has diluted and eroded the phrase over 200 and something years of decisions, and that Congress has also eroded it, but that the starting point is that power not specifically taken away sits where it always was, with the people. Clint Bolick said that was absolutely right. Zadek added that when Bolick described federalism as devolving power back down to the states and to the cities and to the people, the power never should have left to begin with, and that the aim is to get back to even rather than to change things; Bolick again agreed. Bolick gave the example that under common law the government has no power to create monopolies, a right not mentioned anywhere in the United States Constitution, and argued that because the power to create monopolies was never delegated to any government, especially the national government, that power does not exist — the kind of power referred to in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, powers never ceded to government and not thought necessary to list because it was so well understood that certain rights were obvious and certain powers equally obviously were not delegated. local_leviathan__clint_bolick_on_grassroots_tyranny
Tax competition and the corporate floor
Zadek described proposals to prevent states from using federal money to reduce their state taxes as a kind of minimum wage for taxation, where no one is allowed to pay less than a certain amount. He said that in a somewhat stealthy way the Biden administration, in one of their pending tax bills — some recovery act — had tried in its domestic tax policy proposals to prevent states from using wealth they get from the federal government to reduce state taxes, and that Biden does not want that because New York, California and Illinois are at a tax competitive disadvantage given their high taxes, with corporations and individuals voting with their feet. In Zadek’s account Biden is determined to eliminate tax competition whether between states or between countries, consistent with a fear of competition. Richard Rubin said one thing he watches is rate gaps, because arbitrage opportunities remain for companies: if the global floor is 15 and a company can pay a minimum of 15% in Ireland or the UK or Spain, while the US domestic rate is 25 — with the administration wanting 28, which Rubin said clearly is not going to happen — and the US says US-based companies have to pay 21% on their foreign income, then a spread of three or five points between a US-headquartered company and a foreign company matters. His general mantra is that taxes matter but not as much as you might think; companies may respond through inversions, through sizable US companies being bought by companies from other countries, or through startup IPO activity happening more with non-US domiciled companies. He said the margin that concerns Republicans is that companies will find ways not to be American and that jobs go with that, and that the counter is that corporate taxes were just cut a lot and the economy did not do all the things promised. He called the effects an unknown, and said a clearer sense would come from the mix between what the global deal is, what other countries do, and what the US Congress agrees to. Auditing the Corporate Income Tax (2021)
Membership and the two-party frame
Introducing Tom Campbell, Zadek said the country has been governed since its existence by a two-party system, that a two-party system was not mentioned in the Constitution, and that political parties were feared by the founders — fears he said history shows were not paranoid but prescient. He said James Madison hoped parties, which he referred to as factions, would neutralize each other’s power, as ambition offsetting ambition, the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object, but that it did not work out that way, and that one hand simply washes the other, leaving citizens the resulting dirty, soapy water. Zadek noted that in 1776 the pamphleteer Thomas Paine offered the colonies 47 pages of Common Sense, which became the most widely read book of the times, and that Campbell was offering a political party of the same name. He said Campbell served five terms in the US Congress and two terms in the California State Senate, holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago and a JD magna cum laude from Harvard, and was a White House Fellow and a US Supreme Court law clerk. Moving California Forward with the Common Sense Party (2023)
Across episodes: what changed
The critique of Congress as an institution captured by organized interests is constant across the excerpts, but the proposed remedy moves. In the 2011 sugar discussion the remedy is electoral and punitive — members who support the program should be kicked out of Congress. By 2018 the argument has shifted to constitutional structure: Zadek and Bolick argue that the power never should have left the people and the states in the first place, so the task is to get back to even rather than to change things. In 2021 the focus is on Congress as the body that would ratify or reject a global corporate tax floor, with Rubin treating the outcome as an open question. The 2013 immigration discussion and the 2023 party discussion supply historical framing rather than a remedy: the 1790 law with no restrictions, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act as the first nationality quota, and the founders’ fear of factions.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe how Congress is organized, its chambers’ rules, its committees, or the mechanics by which a bill becomes law. They do not state the outcome of any of the proposals discussed, including the global corporate tax floor or the state tax provisions Zadek attributes to the Biden administration. No excerpt gives a founding date for Congress, the text of the 1790 immigration law, or the holding of any case; the Supreme Court is mentioned only as having eroded the Tenth Amendment’s closing phrase over time.