Private Government Quotes

“We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.”
― Elizabeth S. Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It)

“People continue to deploy the same justification of market society—that it would secure the personal independence of workers from arbitrary authority—long after it failed to deliver on its original aspiration. The result is a kind of political hemiagnosia: like those patients who cannot perceive one-half of their bodies, a large class of libertarian-leaning thinkers and politicians, with considerable public following, cannot perceive half of the economy: they cannot perceive the half that takes place beyond the market, after the employment contract is accepted.”
― Elizabeth S. Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It)

“Most workplace governments in the United States are dictatorships, in which bosses govern in ways that are largely unaccountable to those who are governed. They don’t merely govern workers; they dominate them.”
― Elizabeth S. Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
― Elizabeth S. Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It)