Business
Government isn't only something states do. It exists wherever some people have the authority to give orders to others, backed by penalties, in any area of life. By that test the workplace is a government, and for many people it governs them more closely than the state does.
Picture a regime where nearly everyone is assigned a superior they must obey. There is no rule of law, the top person takes no orders, and the lowest ranks are controlled all day. That describes the ordinary modern workplace, which many workers themselves call a dictatorship.
Early champions of free markets were on the left. They believed open trade would let people escape lords and masters by becoming independent artisans and small traders. A market of the self-employed and tiny firms looked like a society of equals where no one was dominated.
Pictures of free market society that fit the pre-industrial world still circulate as ideals, blind to how different today's institutions are. They hide workplace domination and leave us without the concepts to name it. Debate is framed as markets versus the state, while most adults actually live under a third thing: private government.
A government is public when it must weigh the interests of those it rules, and when they can take part in running it, review what it does, and hold it to account. It is private when their interests don't count and they have no power to question or influence it. Most employers govern privately in this sense.
Labour can't be separated from the person who does it. So an employer who buys command over work is really buying command over people. The wage deal is therefore a relationship of deep subordination, not just a trade of effort for pay.
A politics hostile to state power can sit comfortably beside enthusiasm for tightly disciplined private institutions. Some defenders of free contract even accept contracts into slavery as valid. Distrust of public authority and acceptance of private authoritarianism thus feed each other.
Employers routinely regulate workers' speech, clothing, manners, and even bodily movements in fine detail. That leaves workers little privacy and few rights. A democratic state could not legally impose these same controls on ordinary citizens, only on prisoners or soldiers.
Large-scale industry replaced small workshops with big firms. Most people became lifelong employees, as dependent on the owner as any servant and bound to obey him. The dream that market freedom would bring personal independence collapsed, so workers turned to collectivist alternatives.
A common claim is that we can't have prosperity unless workers submit to employers' unchecked power. Slaveholders made the same argument against abolition. It treats a benefit to consumers as justification for domination, when the real question is whether people interact as equals.