Private Government

Here's something that would alarm you if the government did it: monitoring your speech on and off the job, dictating how you dress and style your hair, controlling when you eat and whether you can use the toilet, requiring you to answer questionnaires about your exercise habits and childbearing intentions, rifling through your belongings, and drug-testing your body. But when your employer does it, we don't even call it government — we call it "company policy."¹

Elizabeth Anderson's argument in Private Government is that large corporations are, for all practical purposes, unaccountable governments that exercise sweeping authority over their employees' lives. The only difference between corporate governance and state governance is that we've developed elaborate philosophical traditions to justify the former while remaining vigilant about the latter.

How Did We Get Here?

The intellectual history is ironic. The thinkers who built the case for free markets — the Levellers, Locke, Smith, Paine, Lincoln — were imagining a world of self-employed artisans and small proprietors. Smith's exemplary market actors are butchers and bakers; his pin factory employs ten people. Lincoln, as late as 1859, assumed wage labor was a temporary stage on the way to becoming your own boss: "The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself."

None of these thinkers could conceive of a world where most people spend most of their lives as permanent employees of organizations with tens of thousands of workers, under management structures more complex than most governments they'd ever encountered. The philosophical case for market freedom was built for an economy of independent producers; it was then grandfathered into an economy of corporate employment without anyone really checking whether the argument still worked.

It doesn't. The promise was that free markets would protect individuals from tyrannical power. Instead, the absence of regulation has allowed companies to become tyrants over their workers, using the very language of individual freedom to justify it. Corporations claim they need "freedom" — meaning freedom from regulation — in order to impose all manner of regulation on their employees.

The Scope of Corporate Power

The practical scope of employer authority in at-will employment jurisdictions (most of the United States) is staggering. Workers have been fired for being too attractive, for declining to attend a political rally favored by their employer, for having a daughter who was raped by a friend of the boss. These are not hypotheticals — they're documented cases. Most workers don't even know the legal scope of their employer's power until they're fired for something they assumed was protected.

And this is just the direct power. The rise of temp agencies and gig platforms has created additional layers of unaccountability. Walmart used subcontractors to employ hundreds of cleaners from Eastern Europe who worked for months without overtime pay or a single day off; when federal agents raided, Walmart claimed ignorance. Uber designates its drivers as contractors rather than employees, exempting itself from minimum wage and overtime requirements. The fiction of the "independent contractor" lets companies exercise the control of an employer while discarding the obligations.

Beyond formal power, there's the soft coercion of the labor market itself. The rise of at-will employment, the decline of unions, and the absence of nationalized healthcare mean that most Americans can't afford to lose their jobs. This gives employers enormous implicit leverage: you don't need to threaten someone whose mortgage depends on your continued goodwill. The "choice" to accept employment is formally free but practically coerced — much like the "choice" to obey a government whose territory you can't afford to leave.

The Work Ideology

James Livingston pushes the argument further: not just employers but work itself has become a form of ideological control. We've been trained — by Protestant theology, by capitalist economics, by sheer cultural repetition — to see work as the source of meaning, character, and moral worth. "Fuck work," Livingston suggests, pointing out that the connection between labor and virtue has been questioned by everyone from Marx to Freud to Keynes.

The practical case against work-as-salvation is also strong. Real household wages have been stagnant since the 1970s. Entry-level wages for high school graduates have fallen. Those at the top derive their wealth not from work but from returns on capital. The "work hard and you'll succeed" narrative hasn't matched reality for most Americans in fifty years, but it persists because it's useful to employers: if workers believe their dignity depends on employment, they'll accept almost any working conditions.

Keynes predicted in 1930 that by now we'd be working fifteen-hour weeks, freed by productivity gains to pursue leisure and culture. Instead, we work longer hours than our grandparents did, and we feel guilty about any time not spent being "productive." The productivity gains went almost entirely to capital, not to leisure. This isn't because Keynes was wrong about productivity; he was wrong about power. The gains were captured by the people who already had the most, because the political and institutional structures that might have distributed them more broadly — unions, regulation, a strong welfare state — were systematically dismantled.

Exit, Voice, and Private Government

Anderson's analysis connects to a broader question about how power is checked. In Albert Hirschman's framework, you can respond to an institution's failures through "exit" (leave) or "voice" (speak up and change things from within). For employees, exit means quitting — which, as noted, is often impractical. Voice means unions and collective bargaining — which have been systematically weakened. What remains is "loyalty" by default: accepting whatever your employer does because you have no realistic alternative.

This makes the analogy to government uncomfortably precise. Citizens of authoritarian states also lack effective exit and voice. The difference is that we recognize authoritarian government as a problem that requires institutional solutions — constitutions, elections, rights. We don't apply the same thinking to corporate power, even though the average American spends more waking hours under corporate authority than under state authority.

The connection to the Luddite question is direct: automation doesn't just eliminate jobs, it shifts bargaining power further toward employers. When machines can do what workers do, workers become dispensable, which means their ability to demand better conditions evaporates. The promise that automation will "free" us from drudgery only holds if the gains are distributed; otherwise, it just makes the private government more absolute.