Steven Horwitz: We Don't Necessarily Need The Government To Counter Private Power

See Power and the Market.

"That's the title of my Freeman column this morning (and yes, it's a play on Rothbard). The topic is the reality of non-political forms of power and what they imply for classical liberal societies.

Moreover, to theorize that public power is a check on private power rather than its handmaiden ignores centuries of evidence of the role governments have played in serving the interests of the economically powerful. As I have argued before, this is a feature not a bug of government intervention. When John Kenneth Galbraith argued in the 1950s that government regulation could serve as a “countervailing power” against large corporations, he was either naïve or ignorant of the corporatist origins of much regulation already in existence.

The ultimate countervailing power is not the State but the combination of market competition and social activism. In a free society unions can play a countervailing role as well, though not in partnership with the State. Offering alternatives, organizing collectively, and using boycotts, ostracism, and other forms of social pressure are all ways of limiting power exercised problematically in the market."