Private Tyranny' Is Less Private Than You Think

KIMBERLY NARANJO MAKES for a sympathetic protagonist. In childhood, she suffered abuse at home. In early adulthood, she struggled with addiction

- STEPHANIE SLADE

But with the help of a kindly aunt, she got help, went back to school, and found a rewarding job as a drug and alcohol counselor.

Then came the mesothelioma diagnosis, which her lawyers say was caused by asbestos in Johnson & Johnson baby powder.

With less than 16 months to live, Naranjo hoped to collect damages from the megacorporation that could be used to support her children when she was gone. But her lawsuit quickly ran aground. Facing tens of thousands of potential claimants, Johnson & Johnson turned to a controversial aspect of the bankruptcy reorganization process in a bid to limit its liability. “Yes,” writes the post-liberal journalist Sohrab Ahmari, “J&J—a profitable firm with a market capitalization of nearly half a trillion dollars—claimed to be broke.”

This is just one in a litany of human-interest stories that Ahmari tells in Tyranny, Inc. (Forum Books), each of them eloquent and dripping with pathos. His book’s goal is to show “that private actors can imperil freedom just as much as overweening governments,” and his central claim is nothing if not bold: “Private tyranny precisely describes the world we inhabit today: a system that allows the asset-owning few to subject the asset-less many to pervasive coercion.”

In the face of this nightmare, Ahmari says, the way forward is clear: reject unfettered markets and shift from the current “neoliberal” system to a different arrangement. Call it “social democracy,” “socially managed capitalism,” or—Ahmari’s preference—“political-exchange capitalism”: a sort of light democratic socialism in which “the state” takes “a far more active role in coordinating economic activity for the good of the whole community.”