Paul's 1988 presidential candidacy, when Paul ran as the candidate for the Libertarian Party, along with his 2008 presidential candidacy, when Paul ran as a Republican. Carlson said in 2004, "I hate all nanny-state regulations, such as seat belt laws and smoking bans." From 2009 through 2015, Carlson was a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Since 2018, he has promoted more populist economics, attacking libertarianism, saying "market capitalism is not a religion" and portraying some Republicans as "controlled by the banks". In an interview, he said that economic and technological change that occurs too quickly can cause widespread social and political upheaval, and praised President Theodore Roosevelt, saying his intervention in the economy in the early 1900s may have prevented a communist revolution in the United States. In 2019 on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson said America's "ruling class" are, in effect, the "mercenaries" behind the decline of the American middle class, and "any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society." He cited parallels between the problems of inner cities and rural areas as evidence that the "culture of poverty" cited by conservatives as the cause of urban decline "wasn't the whole story", and that "Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make market economies possible." In January 2019, Carlson used a Washington Post op-ed by Romney to criticize what he described as the "mainstream Republican" worldview, consisting of "unwavering support for a finance-based economy. Carlson has criticized hedge funds (singling out the Republican donor Paul Singer in 2019) and private equity (in criticizing Mitt Romney, former CEO of Bain Capital). He described the business model of firms like Bain as: "Take over an existing company for a short period of time, cut costs by firing employees, run up the debt, extract the wealth and move on, sometimes leaving retirees without their earned pensions. ... Meanwhile, a remarkable number of the companies are now bankrupt or extinct." He attacked payday lenders, saying they "loan people money they can't possibly repay" and "charge them interest that impoverishes them" He praised Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren's economic plan and called her book The Two Income Trap "one of the best books I've ever read on economics". Environment On his show, Carlson frequently hosts guests who downplay the scientific consensus on climate