Elizabeth Warren is discussed in two episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, both times by guests rather than in her own words. In the earlier episode she appears as a supporter of single-payer Medicare for All; in the later one she is the subject of a segment on inflation and grocery prices. The excerpts do not supply her title, her state, her biography, or any extended statement from her.
Single-payer and Medicare for All
In the 2019 episode, Sally Pipes describes single-payer Medicare for All as envisioned by Bernie Sanders, Pramila Jayapal, and Elizabeth Warren, and sometimes Kamala Harris Sally Pipes on the High Cost of Free Stuff (2019). Pipes says single-payer means there is one payer for all healthcare, and that would be the government. Under the Sanders and Jayapal plans, she says, the government would be the provider of healthcare, with only the Veterans Administration and the Indian Health Services left outside; everything else would be rolled into one giant single-payer healthcare system.
Pipes places Warren in what she calls Bernie’s camp, pushing single-payer. She contrasts this with Kamala Harris, who Pipes says said in Des Moines, Iowa, earlier that year that she supported single-payer and wanted to get rid of the insurance companies, then backtracked; in the first debate, when the host asked who supported single-payer, Harris put her hand up along with Sanders, Warren, the New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and herself, and later that night said she really didn’t understand the question. Pipes describes the field as 24 candidates who either support single-payer like Bernie or support what she calls a stepping-stone approach, such as Joe Biden’s support for a public option—a government insurance company competing in the insurance exchanges in the states and healthcare.gov with private carriers. In Pipes’s account, all of these plans would crowd out private coverage and ultimately produce a single-payer Medicare for All system.
Pipes also notes that Sanders released a single-payer bill in 2017 without saying how much it would cost or how it would be paid for, introduced a revised system in April of that year, and said just the other day that his plan would probably cost between $30 and $40 trillion over 10 years, paid for by tremendous new taxes and higher taxes on existing taxes. She describes Canada as banning all private coverage for anything considered medically necessary, and says she grew up under single-payer there. The excerpt breaks off at the heading “The Reality of Wait Times and Rationing,” so the discussion of waits and rationing that Pipes promises does not appear in the source.
Inflation and the “Big Grocery” charge
The 2022 episode turns on a different accusation. Don Boudreaux says Elizabeth Warren recently blamed the rise in grocery prices not on her own institution, the government, which he says injected unprecedented amounts of purchasing power into the economy, but on greed and on the alleged monopolization of retail grocery Liz Warren’s Crusade against “Big Grocery (2022). He calls this absurd: people do not spend greed units, they spend dollars, and if there are no more dollars to spend, prices cannot rise. On competition, he lists Amazon, Walmart, Target, Kroger, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods as options, and says there is enormous competition in retail grocery. He concludes that Warren is either astonishingly economically ill-informed or mendacious.
Bob Zadek frames the segment by saying Warren has been public and outspoken in her complaint about what she perceives as bad behavior, that she used the word greed, and that she has been unhappy with grocery stores for being motivated by greed rather than by a duty to be good stewards of investors’ money and to make sure their enterprise earns a profit. He says she has been complaining that they unlawfully focus on profits at the expense of customers, and that she has been inviting, if not demanding, antitrust action against the grocery stores on the theory that they have a monopoly. Zadek says they do not have a monopoly, and that if they are monopolists they are very bad at it because their profit margins are so low.
Boudreaux calls the performance political grandstanding and says he has trouble believing even she is so stupid as to think the rise in prices today is caused by monopolization of consumer retail. He says prices are rising because of what he calls the evil done in the very institution in which Warren plays such a large and dominant role, the government; that she voted in favor of prolific spending programs; and that the Federal Reserve has been injecting spending power into the economy. He says she does not dare look in the mirror to put the blame on herself, and that the fact he thinks she knows better does not speak well to her ethics. He adds that she has presented no evidence of monopolization because she has none, other than the fact that prices are rising.
Zadek observes that grocery prices have never been lower than they are now in history. Boudreaux qualifies this as in real terms: the amount of time ordinary Americans must work to earn enough income to buy a pound of potatoes or broccoli or cans of green beans or lettuce has for decades, at least leading up to COVID, increasingly shrunk, meaning these items have become much more affordable. Nominal prices are rising because of inflation, and to the extent they rise faster than wages there is a short-term increase in the real cost of groceries. Boudreaux attributes that problem not to greed or monopolization but to the increase in spending power, and quotes Milton Friedman’s line that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
Price controls and the wider argument
The grocery segment widens into a discussion of price controls in which Warren is named only at the margins. Zadek says it is a standard device for government, when at fault, to look around for another demon and direct public attention to a non-governmental actor—in this case grocery chains—so that attention is deflected from government, the real problem. He says some economists, having caused the problem of inflation, now resort to the governmental fallback of price controls, and asks Boudreaux to explain what wage and price controls mean and how insidious that cure is.
Boudreaux says price controls are the government prohibiting sellers from raising prices, or restricting how high they can raise them, with fines or jail for raising prices too much. He offers Milton Friedman’s analogy: trying to control inflation with price controls is like trying to control a heater pumping too much heat into a room by putting a little metal strip into a thermometer to prevent the mercury from rising. He says price controls are a lie, a command by the government to every seller to lie to the economy about the real value of the things they have to sell, and compares them to a mayor ordering newspapers to report a false murder count. He recalls August 1971, when Richard Nixon imposed a nationwide wage-price freeze on all prices and wages in an attempt to control inflation, which he calls a terrific failure, and says wage-price controls have never worked for any of the things they have been attempted to be used to do.
Zadek argues that price is information, what buyers and sellers use to allocate resources and time, and gives the example of a used car worth $25,000 on the market that the government dictates may be sold only for $10,000: the owner will either not sell, denying himself the money and denying a buyer the car, or the deal will go forward in an underground garage, in the black market. He notes that the White House as recently as last month had looked somewhat fondly on wage and price controls, and that Jen Psaki, in a December press conference complaining about meat prices, indicated the White House and the Department of Agriculture were looking at wage and price controls to stem what Zadek calls corporate greed. Boudreaux says Ronald Reagan’s first official act as president, in January 1981, was to eliminate price controls on energy, after which energy prices including gasoline spiked immediately and then went right back down because sellers returned to the market. He says the Biden administration and the likes of Elizabeth Warren seem to think their only constituency is 20-something progressives from Brooklyn with no memory beyond the George W. Bush administration. The excerpt breaks off mid-sentence there.
Across episodes
The two episodes touch the same figure without developing her: in 2019 Sally Pipes names Warren as a single-payer advocate alongside Sanders and Jayapal, and in 2022 Don Boudreaux names her as the politician blaming grocery prices on greed and monopolization. The excerpts show no change in how Warren is treated between the earlier and later episode—she is in both cases a named example of a policy position the guest rejects—and no exchange between the two treatments.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Warren’s title, her state, her party affiliation, or any biographical detail beyond her being grouped with other candidates and officeholders. They contain no quotation from Warren herself, no description of a bill she introduced, and no account of what any antitrust case or statute provides. The 2019 excerpt ends before the promised discussion of wait times and rationing, and the 2022 excerpt ends mid-sentence, so neither the consequences Pipes intended to describe nor Boudreaux’s closing thought appears in the sources.