America, Inc.

In his new book, Sohrab Ahmari gives an optimistic view of how to free ourselves from private tyranny.

Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle referred to economics as the “dismal science,” which is an apt term for a supposed “science” that reduces man to mere numbers and economic productivity. Carlyle treated economics as such because he saw that there was no way beyond it — the working man was suffering from inanition and the lacked proper leadership. Sohrab Ahmari paints a similar picture in his newest book Tyranny Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It, concerning the power that corporate firms wield in the United States. Most importantly, he addresses why this is troublesome and has greater effects on the real economy, but more importantly, on the ordinary, common worker.

Ahmari does not despair, however, in turn presenting an optimistic plan to pull us out of private coercion and tyranny. Ahmari suggests the reintroduction of what he calls “political-exchange capitalism,” a system where the employee and employer cooperate for mutual benefit, reflecting the unequal reality of labor markets, and supporting state intervention when necessary to ensure the good of the worker. (Ahmari distinguishes political-exchange capitalism from theories of market utopianism and neoliberalism). This is not an all that uncommon economic model, something that has been advocated by popes, philosophers, and economists alike.¹

English philosopher Michael Oakeshott defined political activity as “the state acting to attend to the arrangements of society.”² Ideally, this should always be the case: the state intervening for the benefit of the citizenry and the common good, with the understanding that needs arise from the bottom-up and can be supplied and promoted from the top-down. Therefore, should the state not be able to combat and malign private and financial actors from harming the well-being of workers and ordinary people? Why have we left ourselves defenseless by believing that the “free market” will naturally solve our problems, much less deliver us from the tyranny of private corporations, from wage theft to “big tech” censorship? Since the end of the Cold War, the market has served as an ersatz state, and has imposed its own limitlessness and desire to conquer and extract value. This is part of a wider economic transformation, the transition out of Fordist, physical and  manual labor, to post-Fordist, financialization.

Ahmari excellently paints this economic transformation in a chapter on the fall of Sears, a firm that he classified as an “eroder”³ by the time it went bankrupt. An eroder is a firm that as assets grow opts not to reinvest, rather, it seeks to exclusively benefit and payout shareholders. In other words, an eroder is Milton Friedman’s dream.⁴ This is typically how private equity firms conduct business: extract any supposed value, repackage it, and pay it out to shareholders. Ahmari notes that conduct of this sort “are not valuable activities themselves. They invent, create, build, and provide nothing. In fact, financial wizardry of this kind often destroys businesses, jobs, and communities.”⁵ In short, the economics of an eroder takes away from traditional generators of value and destroys the real economy: the human person.

Ahmari notes of the swaths of people Sears employed all around the country, including their auto-centers and big box all-one stores. Sears provided people with supplied goods and a steady work environment for employees — it truly was an American brand. Ahmari writes of one employee that said the attitude at Sears was: “Take care of people that make you money.”⁶ This was the attitude for most of the country before private equity swallowed physical marketplaces and the market in the abstract. Eddie Lampert, CEO of Sears at the time of its fall, felt in order for Sears to truly compete with market trends it needed to abandon traditional drivers of growth, namely their big box stores and auto-centers, and needed to enter the “investment” game.

This proved disastrous for the employees of Sears. It ended up siphoning away from their steady and livable wages, and often ended up forcing them to overwork themselves, leading to physical and mental burnout. Due to the way Lampert restructured Sears, pay was cut from seventeen dollars to nine dollars and fifty cents an hour. This created a horrible combination of employee shortages and overwhelming demand, quickly becoming unsustainable for the one employee, who eventually lost his home and job. This was just one such case, now think of the other thousands of employees of Sears by the time of its fall. This dehumanization and devaluing of the work that Sears leadership imposed is the perfect example of what Carlyle means when referring to economics as “the dismal science.”  

As for Sears leadership, they all were compensated handsomely for their preforming their “duty,” as opposed to the base pay employees received in severance.⁷ Conditions such as these are simply unsustainable, an underclass completely abused and an over bloated aristocracy. In a similar way, Carlyle wrote of this in his book Past in Present, asking:

To whom, then, is this wealth of England wealth? Who is it that it blesses; makes happier, wiser, beautifuller, in any way better? Who has got hold of it, to make it fetch and carry for him, like a true servant, not like a false mock-servant; to do him any real service whatsoever? … Midas longed for gold, he insulted the Olympians, and the gods gave it to him.⁸

From Ahmari’s apt storytelling and journalistic style, the fall of Sears unveils not only the economic consequences of a failing business, but most importantly, the human toll as well. This is something not often written about in “conservative” magazines or publications dedicated to the dismal science, such as Reason or the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. The human view that Ahmari gives us is deeply informed by the Catholic view of the person, dignified and created by God, and owed the goods that the political community holds in common. In contrast, the anti-human “invisible hand” has no conception of what is common or good. It only considers winners and losers, something many business and corporate leaders, such as Lampert, take to heart and inflict this view on those that they can abuse for the sake of profit.

British social and cultural theorist Mark Fisher drew apocalyptic visions with the spread of this view of economic activity and its unsustainability, drawing comparisons to the 2006 film Children of Men, in his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? However, Ahmari draws on New Deal-era, FDR-style legislation to provide a substantive economic alternative, seeking to strike the balance between employee and employer, or political-exchange capitalism. Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum advocated for a system of political-exchange capitalism and distributism so that workers could support their families.⁹

In the concluding chapter, Ahmari makes a compelling case for political-exchange capitalism to counter the malign effects of private coercion, in that the state is the only mechanism that can ameliorate and reform the failure of our economic system to work for the common man. This was the same conclusion that Pope Pius XI came to in Quadragesimo Anno, where Pius also realized the impediments that liberalism, and more specifically individualism, posed to political-exchange capitalism, while recognizing the state as an institution to achieve reform.

When we speak of the reform of institutions, the State comes chiefly to mind, not as if universal well-being were to be expected from its activity, but because things have come to such a pass through the evil of what we have termed “individualism” that, following upon the overthrow and near extinction of that rich social life which was once highly developed through associations of various kinds, there remain virtually only individuals and the State. This is to the great harm of the State itself; for, with a structure of social governance lost, and with the taking over of all the burdens which the wrecked associations once bore. The State has been overwhelmed and crushed by almost infinite tasks and duties.¹⁰

No political regime or economic system can outlast its own unsustainability. The political and economic ideology around liberalism and laissez-faire economics are in the throes of its own death. Ahmari gives an optimistic view of how to free ourselves from private tyranny. Paired with clear political goals and a more Christian (and small “d” democratic) way of thinking about the person, Ahmari rightly urges us to move beyond the politics and the “dismal science” of liberalism.

Tyranny Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It, can be purchased here.

1. See: Pope Leo XIII, Pope Pius XI, G.K. Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc, and E.F. Schumacher.

2. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, (Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1991).

3. Sohrab Ahmari, Tyranny Inc., (New York: Random House, 2023), 69.

4. Corporations that have no other obligation than that of the shareholder.

5. Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc., 72.

6. Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc., 63.

7. Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc., 77.

8. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. David R. Sorenson and Brent E. Kinser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 21.

9. A system of economics where assets and property are widely owned as opposed to concentrated in corporations or in the economic elite.

10. Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 1931.