Private Government
How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk About It)
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Narrated by:
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Lauren Pedersen
About this listen
Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can't see it
One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.
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The Constitution of Liberty is considered Hayek's classic statement on the ideals of freedom and liberty, ideals that he believes have guided - and must continue to guide - the growth of Western civilization. Here, Hayek defends the principles of a free society, casting a skeptical eye on the growth of the welfare state and examining the challenges to freedom posed by an ever-expanding government.
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very detailed and important
- By Big Kyle 570 on 06-17-20
By: Ronald Hamowy - Edited by, and others
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Capitalism
- The Unknown Ideal
- By: Ayn Rand
- Narrated by: Anna Fields
- Length: 14 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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The foundations of capitalism are being battered by a flood of altruism, which is the cause of the modern world's collapse. This was the view of Ayn Rand, a view so radically opposed to prevailing attitudes that it constituted a major philosophic revolution. In this series of essays, she presented her stand on the persecution of big business, the causes of war, the default of conservatism, and the evils of altruism.
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Ashame this is not taught in our
- By Karen on 08-18-07
By: Ayn Rand
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Adam Smith
- Father of Economics
- By: Jesse Norman
- Narrated by: Jesse Norman
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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A dazzlingly original account of the life and thought of Adam Smith, the greatest economist of all time. In Adam Smith, political philosopher Jesse Norman dispels the myths and caricatures, and provides a far more complex portrait of the man. Offering a highly engaging account of Smith's life and times, Norman explores his work as a whole and traces his influence over two centuries to the present day. Finally, he shows how a proper understanding of Smith can help us address the problems of modern capitalism.
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Most excellent book!
- By Harish G. Naik on 03-02-19
By: Jesse Norman
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Radical Markets
- Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
- By: Eric A. Posner, E. Glen Weyl
- Narrated by: James Conlan
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Many blame today's economic inequality, stagnation, and political instability on the free market. The solution is to rein in the market, right? Radical Markets turns this thinking - and pretty much all conventional thinking about markets, both for and against - on its head. The book reveals bold new ways to organize markets for the good of everyone.
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Terrible Reader ruins this book
- By Brian W. Veit on 10-30-18
By: Eric A. Posner, and others
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The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution
- Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic
- By: Ganesh Sitaraman
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable - and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America's republic.
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Very well done
- By JLyman on 08-27-17
By: Ganesh Sitaraman
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Equal Is Unfair
- America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
- By: Don Watkins, Yaron Brook
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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We've all heard that the American Dream is vanishing, and that the cause is rising income inequality. The rich are getting richer by rigging the system in their favor, leaving the rest of us to struggle just to keep our heads above water. To save the American Dream, we're told that we need to fight inequality through tax hikes, wealth redistribution schemes, and a far higher minimum wage.
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While I agree with most of this book,...
- By Wayne on 12-30-16
By: Don Watkins, and others
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Bourgeois Equality
- How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World
- By: Deirdre N. McCloskey
- Narrated by: Marguerite Gavin
- Length: 29 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Few economists or historians write like McCloskey - her ability to invest the facts of economic history with the urgency of a novel, or of a leading case at law, is unmatched. She summarizes modern economics and modern economic history with verve and lucidity yet sees through to the really big scientific conclusion. Not matter, but ideas. Big books don't come any more ambitious or captivating than Bourgeois Equality.
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How the world got rich
- By Andrew Cooper-Sansone on 01-26-23
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World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction
- A John Hope Franklin Center Book
- By: Immanuel Wallerstein
- Narrated by: Fred Filbrich
- Length: 4 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In World-Systems Analysis, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach that he pioneered 30 years ago to understanding the history and development of the modern world. Since Wallerstein first developed world-systems analysis, it has become a widely utilized methodology within the historical social sciences and a common point of reference in discussions of globalization.
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Uneven, but Ambitious
- By Logical Paradox on 08-27-14
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The Mystery of Capital
- Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
- By: Hernando de Soto
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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"The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph," writes Hernando de Soto, "is, in the eyes of four-fifths of humanity, its hour of crisis." In The Mystery of Capital, the world-famous Peruvian economist takes up one of the most pressing questions the world faces today: Why do some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail?
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Good global perspective on Capitalism
- By Nellie boi on 05-29-21
By: Hernando de Soto
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America
- Imagine a World Without Her
- By: Dinesh D'Souza
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Is America a source of pride, as Americans have long held, or shame, as Progressives allege? Beneath an innocent exterior, are our lives complicit in a national project of theft, expropriation, oppression, and murder? Or is America still the hope of the world? New York Times best-selling author Dinesh D'Souza says these questions are no mere academic exercise.
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We can think for ourselves
- By score bags on 06-21-14
By: Dinesh D'Souza
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What listeners say about Private Government
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- That Guy
- 02-17-24
Disappointing 
Heard the author on a podcast, I listen to, The discussion was lively, thought-provoking, and very engaging, and I assumed the book would be the same. 
Bad assumption. I only made it three hours through the book before I gave up. It seems to be written and delivered in a relatively dispassionate and sanitized third person manner. Sometimes it takes on a more narrative format, but the reader talks about the author and how magnificent her lectures are multiple times, which is an extremely gratuitous thing to do when the author is writing about herself… and three hours into it I still haven’t heard any of these lectures, and there’s only two hours to go.
Starts off by telling you that it will address critiques of the work and refute them as part of the academic and scholarly process. When it gets to some very basic critiques of the work it seems to be cherry picking weak arguments to discuss in the first place, and it seems to also cherry pick the way it responds to those arguments, the whole thing seems like a waste of time.
Normally, I wouldn’t be this harsh on a review, but I’ve listened to 115 books on audible and I’m used to them being pretty good. On this one I not only lost my interest, but it appeared to be less analysis than a puff piece on the author, and a restating of historical facts with very little analysis, passion, or real authentic energy behind it.
I am totally biased here, I’m sure the author worked very hard to write this. I think my bias is coming from the fact that I was so engaged and interested by the podcast, that the bar was set very high, and this book just didn’t deliver for me.
Reader doesn’t liven it up either, feels like a NPR host reading an encyclopedia.
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