Politics & Power Quote by Drew Carey

Drew Carey isn’t praising Vegas so much as using it as a funhouse mirror for the American self-image: freedom as a consumer product, liberty measured in operating hours. The line lands because it sounds like a compliment and a warning at the same time. “Everything that’s right with America” is the kind of grand, flag-waving claim you’d expect to end in apple pie; instead it swivels to “whatever you want, 24 hours a day,” reducing national virtue to nonstop availability. The punchline is that America’s idea of rights can look a lot like a store that never closes.

Carey’s actor-comedian sensibility matters here. He delivers a familiar cultural punch: Vegas as the place where the rules loosen, the masks come off, and pleasure is streamlined into a frictionless transaction. “They’ve effectively legalized everything” is hyperbole with teeth. It implies not that the law vanished, but that enforcement, social judgment, and consequence feel negotiable if you’ve got the money and the will. That’s the subtext: in the right marketplace, morality becomes optional, and regulation becomes a vibe.

The context is Vegas’s long-running role as America’s pressure valve - a city built to contain vice by concentrating it, branding it, and selling it back as entertainment. Carey’s line captures the uneasy bargain: we celebrate freedom most loudly when it’s packaged, surveilled, and monetized. Vegas doesn’t break the American dream; it speed-runs it.