The Illogic of Tyranny, Inc.

In the September 11 issue of National Review, I reviewed Sohrab Ahmari’s book, Tyranny, Inc. You can read my review here. I focused on how Ahmari’s narrative does not align with the average worker’s experience and how it runs contrary to the way economists think about the nature of firms and labor markets.

When reviewing a book, you can’t cover everything that you might want to. The author has hundreds of pages, and the reviewer has 1,500 words. Another shortcoming in Ahmari’s book is that it just doesn’t make much sense, on its own terms.

Michael Pakaluk of Catholic University has written a new piece for Law & Liberty that runs through some of Ahmari’s internal contradictions. Throughout the book, Ahmari uses anecdotes to illustrate his anger against what he calls “libertarianism,” which he believes has overrun American institutions and controls American society.

Never mind the $6 trillion federal budget, the $800 billion military, the default government monopoly on primary education, the gusher of subsidies for green energy and semiconductors, zoning regulations that prevent the construction of new housing, thousand-page environmental-impact statements for any significant project, the fact that the entire mortgage market is backed by effectively nationalized companies, the fact that all mail delivery and inter-city trains are run by government corporations. . . . The country’s current governing ethos is libertarianism, according to Ahmari.

Ahmari’s anecdotes often don’t prove the point he thinks they prove. Pakaluk writes:

Consider his treatment of “just in time” (JIT) scheduling, where workers (say, in a restaurant) volunteer to take shifts, or are assigned them, only at the beginning of each week, when the need for hours looks clearer to the manager. Ahmari tells the story of Alicia Fleming, who after years in the restaurant service profession had a baby at 35 and could not continue to work at her job if her hours were unpredictable on account of JIT scheduling. For Ahmari, it’s a story of how she “and countless others of the kind … have lost many of the political gains they made in the twentieth century.”

But “just in time” management was first developed in Japan in manufacturing after WWII, and quickly imitated by the US and other countries in manufacturing. Only in the last couple of decades was it applied widely in the service sector. The New Deal never prohibited it; its rise has nothing to do with Reaganism or libertarianism.

Like most everything else, people take different sides on the matter because there is a trade-off. Many workers appreciate not being on site when they are not needed—it gives them more free time. Moreover, they like to work as a team towards the success of a restaurant, and greater efficiency can mean a more secure business down the road. At the same time, many managers are moving away from it because it can lead to high turnover. Ahmari says nothing about a trade-off, as it would not fit into any of his stories. JIT scheduling is private tyranny, period.

Oddly, in his discussion of the case, Ahmari implicitly adopts the viewpoint of the “autonomous individual,” which he attacks elsewhere as misguided “libertarianism.” Where did Alicia Fleming’s baby come from? Who was the father? Why doesn’t he help her raise the child? Where is her extended family? Shouldn’t the extended family be a buffer against “private tyranny”? Suppose a woman chose to have three babies over three years from three different men—what exactly would be an employer’s responsibility to her, if we don’t, after all, treat her as an autonomous individual (and yet, as Ahmari does in his analysis)?

So this hand-picked example supports none of the three Ahmaris. In particular, JIT scheduling is not a case of a New Deal settlement getting overturned by Reagan-era “libertarianism.”

Pakaluk goes through several other examples that show how Ahmari’s anecdotes have little if anything to do with his enemies, which are, roughly, capitalism, classical liberalism, and Ronald Reagan. Pakaluk’s piece is well worth a read.

I’d like to add one more: Ahmari’s anecdotes about Sears. He devotes an entire chapter of the book to Sears, glorying in its past as a provider of quality goods to customers and quality jobs to workers. He spends large parts of it bashing Eddie Lampert, the billionaire who took over Sears and, in Ahmari’s telling, “eroded” the once-great company. Ahmari’s telling is similar to the mainstream media’s: that Lampert is a greedy tycoon who doesn’t care about Sears employees and enriches himself at the expense of a once-great American brand.

This argument is strange for a few reasons. First, as Ahmari acknowledges, Sears was already in a bad way for decades before Lampert took over as CEO in 2013. Lampert isn’t responsible for the decline.

Second, Lampert was wealthy before he took over Sears. He made his money in finance. If you were looking to invest a lot of money in a company in the early 2000s, would you pick Sears? I wouldn’t, but I’m not a wealthy investor. Maybe wealthy investors know special wealthy-investor techniques to make money on an obviously failing business like Sears.

For a little while, it seemed like Lampert was pulling it off. But then reality reasserted itself and Sears became the loser we all knew it was. As he ran Sears, Lampert’s wealth declined. By a lot. Forbes put it at $3.1 billion in 2013 and $1 billion in 2019. Nobody is saying he’s poor, and I’m not sad for him. But he, personally, lost $2 billion, or roughly two-thirds of his wealth, over six years as CEO of Sears. (Since 2019, he has been chairman of a holding company that oversees Sears, but he’s no longer CEO.)

If Lampert was trying to personally benefit from his actions at Sears, he was really, really bad at it. The problem with Lampert is not that he’s an evil genius; it’s that he’s committed to the idea that Sears is still a viable brand. He’s still, in the year of our Lord two-thousand and twenty-three, a major investor in Sears. He’s an idiot.

Third, when Sears was dominant, it was exactly the type of powerful, national firm that Ahmari believes presents a threat to working people. His argument is that workers need a “countervailing force,” in the form of organized labor and government protections, against powerful corporations because otherwise they won’t treat workers well. But Sears was a notorious union-buster throughout its history. It was the Amazon of its day, revolutionizing home delivery of consumer goods with the Sears catalogue.

Sears wasn’t just powerful. It was build-the-tallest-skyscraper-in-the-world powerful. Sears products were in just about every American home, and Sears even sold modular homes in the early 1900s. In addition to its department stores, it was a major player in insurance and consumer credit, with Allstate and Discover. It was a national, industry-straddling firm that defeated smaller competitors and accumulated market power for itself.

In his review of Patrick Deneen’s book Regime Change, Jonah Goldberg wrote, “I do wonder why Deneen simultaneously laments the opening of factories in the 18th century and the closing of them in the 21st.” There’s a similar time inconsistency at play with Ahmari and Sears. Powerful corporations today are sources of tyranny, but Sears at the peak of its power was an ideal employer. It doesn’t make much sense.