Tucker Carlson Claims Market Capitalism Has Undermined American Society. He’s Wrong.

On Wednesday evening, Tucker Carlson delivered a 15-minute monologue on his Fox News program regarding the future of economics and politics in the United States. In that monologue, Carlson accurately bemoaned the current state of the American soul – rising suicide rates and overdose rates, declining levels of family generation, declining ties that bind us together. He then attributed that hole in the soul to bad policy, both political and economic.

There’s no question that America has pursued bad policy for years – and that some of that policy has undermined family dynamics. The welfare state, to take an obvious example, has skewed incentive structures for millions of Americans, making it easier for them to break apart their families and raise children in solitude rather than in the comfort and stability of a two-parent married household. When government attempts to solve the ills of individuals, it all too often destroys the incentives that support responsible behavior.