Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk about It).

• Author: Munger, Michael
• Position: Book review

* Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk about It) By Elizabeth Anderson Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. xxiv, 224. $27.95 hardcover.

Libertarians, classical liberals, and market advocates of various stripes often start from what philosophers would--rightly--identity as a "question-begging premise." (I should note that "begging a question," in civilized society at least, means assuming a claim that assures a desired conclusion, especially when that initial claim is itself debatable. If you are one of those who uses the phrase to mean "suggests a new inquiry," you probably don't read books anyway.)

That premise is a pair of binaries that map onto each other. The first is "state versus market." The second is "coercive versus voluntary." The claim is that there is a clean dividing line, and it cleaves at the same boundary: everything states do is coercive; everything markets do is voluntary.

It is obvious why begging the question would be (note the subjunctive) a useful rhetorical strategy in debates, a way of wrong-footing statist opponents: because it requires the supporter of state action to defend coercion when an alternative, voluntary mechanism--markets--exists and can carry out the same functions without coercion.

But nobody outside the libertarian "movement" buys the claim. They see the state (with some exceptions) as embodying the collective, voluntary will to cooperate. And they see markets as exploiting glaring disparities in bargaining power that amount to coercive force. If you want to persuade anyone that markets are substantially less coercive than the state, you will at least need to understand the argument you are up against.

A good place to start is Elizabeth Anderson's marvelous new book Private Government. The book comprises two essays by Anderson and then four commentaries--one by economist Tyler Cowen--followed by Anderson's rebuttal. The commentaries are pretty selective, and the two essays at the outset articulate only a little, but overall the book presents a great deal of matter for thought and discussion. The first essay notes, both rightly and in a nicely presented fashion, the change in the relationship between social reformers and market advocates and asks why it is that modern market advocates still invoke clearly anachronistic claims about the market's capacity for "leveling" in the era of huge firms after the Industrial Revolution.

For the sake of full...