American conservatism has found a new focus in recent years, the moral decline of the nation and, alongside it, a push for religious revival, the kind not seen with this much energy in decades. It's a notable shift, one that says as much about where conservatives think the country went wrong as it does about where they hope to take it next.
But there is another cause for that decline, one that has gone almost entirely unnamed. Not the retreat from faith, but the retreat from the free market.
I fall back once again on the genius of Milton Friedman, the world-renowned free-market economist, who posited that government paternalism is a significant source of moral degradation, not just in those who receive the government benefits, but among those who administer them as well.
“Welfare programs have an insidious effect on the moral fiber of both the people who administer the programs and the people who are supposedly benefiting from it," Friedman said on an episode of his "Free to Choose" series, titled “From Cradle to Grave.” "For the people who administer it, it instills in them a feeling of almost Godlike power. For the people who are supposedly benefiting, it instills a feeling of childlike dependence. Their capacity for personal decision-making atrophies. The result is that the programs involved are a misuse of money. They do not achieve the objectives which it was their intention to achieve. But far more important than this, they tend to rot away the very fabric that holds a decent society together.”
Milton Friedman on how welfare programs destroy a society:
— Milton Friedman Quotes (@MiltonFriedmanW) July 13, 2026
“Welfare programs have an insidious effect on the moral fiber of both the people who administer the programs and the people who are supposedly benefiting from it.
For the people who administer it, it instills in them a… pic.twitter.com/LogLxelMpO
Friedman made that argument in the 1980s. Nearly half a century later, the mechanism he described has corrupted into the premise of an entire political party, and spread through greater society. Democrats, and especially their socialist wing, now openly campaign on taxing success, disincentivizing innovation and wealth creation, and, whether they'd phrase it this way or not, incentivizing helplessness in exchange for a check.
Look at the symptoms conservatives usually cite as evidence of moral decline, and Friedman's mechanism sits underneath most of them.
Take the retreat from work, record numbers of working-age men out of the labor force. That isn't a mystery. When the state guarantees an outcome regardless of effort, effort stops being rational, and the dignity work once provided goes with it.
Then, take the collapse of the family. For decades, welfare policy penalized marriage and even a second earner in the household, since benefits shrank faster than the income they replaced. Government support substituted family formation. A society that pays people to need each other less will eventually have people who need each other less.
And take the loss of personal responsibility, the thread running through nearly every conservative complaint about the culture. Responsibility isn't an inherited quality; it's one that's practiced. A government that makes decisions for you, whether to work, how to budget, or what risks to take, is a government disarming you of the responsibility to make them yourself and placing accountability in the hands of anyone but your own.
Conservatives are right that something is rotting away the moral fabric of society. But they may be looking for the culprit in the wrong place. The decline isn't only a crisis of what people believe. It's a crisis of virtues people were never given the chance to practice, because a government with no business being there got involved in the first place.
