Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty--and What to Do About It by Sohrab Ahmari

Author:Sohrab Ahmari [Ahmari, Sohrab]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

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So much for market society’s origin story. But even if one ignores the means by which the market system was established, its everyday functioning has posed a still-greater challenge to the laissez-faire utopia.

Market utopianism described an economy in which coercion simply couldn’t take place, “because no one had power to misuse,” as the Canadian American economist John Kenneth Galbraith summarized the laissez-faire view.[16] Everyone was supposed to be subject to impersonal market forces crystallized in prices, over which no single actor exercised influence to any appreciable degree, and certainly no undue influence.

What guaranteed this state of affairs was relentless competition. The existence of many producers in any given industry meant that no one of them could wield significant economic power over other market actors, be they consumers, suppliers, or workers. The arch-laissez-faire theorist F. A. Hayek, for example, hailed “competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive…authority.”[17]

Milton Friedman had a similar confidence in competition as a bulwark against coercion. “So long as effective freedom of exchange is maintained,” he wrote in Capitalism and Freedom,

the central feature of the market organization of economic activity is that it prevents one person from interfering with another in respect of most of his activities. The consumer is protected from coercion by the seller because of the presence of other sellers with whom he can deal. The seller is protected from coercion by the consumer because of other consumers to whom he can sell. The employee is protected from coercion by the employer because of other employers for whom he can work, and so on. And the market does this impersonally and without centralized authority.[18]

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