Tucker Carlson Claims Market Capitalism Has Undermined American Society. He's Wrong. | Eastern North Carolina Now

    But Carlson doesn't stay there. He goes right back to railing against the free market, as though it's responsible for family breakdown. He blasts payday lenders, without suggesting exactly how people are supposed to get the rent money on short notice without a government interventionism that breeds dependency - and a dependency that breeds irresponsibility and yes, more single motherhood. Instead, Carlson rants:

    We're OK with that? We shouldn't be. Libertarians tell us that's how markets work -- consenting adults making voluntary decisions about how to live their lives. OK. But it's also disgusting. If you care about America, you ought to oppose the exploitation of Americans, whether it's happening in the inner city or on Wall Street.

    Calling consensual activity exploitation is paternalism, no matter how you slice it. And while Carlson decries drug legalization thanks to the deleterious effects of drug use, he doesn't propose an actual solution. Carlson attributes the quest for marijuana legalization to greed and apathy, but the war on drugs has been a massive failure, jailing thousands of people for voluntary exchanges while failing to lower rates of drug use, and spending trillions to do it.

    Now, not all of Carlson's policy prescriptions are wrong. His point about taxing investment income at the same rates as earnings isn't wrong, for example. But his general conclusion about what ails America is wrong. Here's that conclusion:

    Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You'd have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.

    This is a complete misread of market capitalism. It is not a tool. It is not a "creation" of a centralized decisionmaking process. It is a reality of free and voluntary interactions among human beings. It is an outgrowth of the unique value of each individual, and of each individual's right to use his labor as he sees fit, and to alienate that labor in exchange for the labor of someone else. And markets don't exist to "serve us." They exist to allow us to act in liberty.

    Market capitalism isn't one choice among many; it's not a value neutral proposition. Pretending it is is a road to centralization of power. If you think economics is a tool to wield like a stapler, you're closer to Bernie Sanders than to anything remotely resembling founding philosophy.


    And market capitalism has not destroyed our social fabric. Lack of values did that. If market capitalism exacerbated that problem through materialism and consumerism, that's because we chose to make it so. The fault lies not in the invisible hand, but in us. The sooner we realize that, the sooner we'll start taking the steps to rebuild the institutions that undergirded our free and prosperous society in the first place.

    For further reference, here's the Sunday Special I did with Tucker on many of these topics: