by Liz Wolfe
“Does this economic system produce a lot of Dollar Stores?”
On Glenn Greenwald’s System Update Rumble show, former Fox News star Tucker Carlson issued a scathing indictment of what he calls “libertarian economics” over the weekend.
“Libertarian economics was a scam perpetrated by the beneficiaries of the economic system that they were defending,” Carlson told Greenwald.
“So they created this whole intellectual framework to justify the private equity culture that’s hollowed out the country,” said Carlson. “A smarter way to assess an economic system is by its results.”
“I think you need to ask: ‘Does this economic system produce a lot of Dollar Stores?'” said Carlson. “And if it does, it’s not a system that you want, because it degrades people and it makes their lives worse and it increases exponentially the amount of ugliness in your society. And anything that increases ugliness is evil….So if it’s such a good system, why do we have all these Dollar Stores?”
“And the Dollar Store itself is a sort of symbol … for your total lack of control over where you live, and over the imposition of aggressively in-your-face ugly structures that send one message to you, which is, ‘You mean nothing. You are a consumer, not a human being or a citizen.'”
On so many counts, Carlson is wrong. Life in the U.S. has gotten better since 1969, when he was born, in clear and measurable ways—life expectancy, child mortality rates, average income per person, liberal democratic scores of countries around the world, and much more.
The “lack of control over where you live” is a total fable—though housing supply crunch is real (and government-created). If he’s describing a sense that something is wrong within the American spirit, he should come right out and say so, but I’d expect the causes of these maladies—deaths of despair trending upward, for example, or American males falling behind their female counterparts on educational achievement—are deeper than “cheaply available consumer goods have proliferated.”
Originally published by Reason Foundation. Republished with permission.
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