As suggested above, a difficulty with MacIntyre’s way of proceeding is that he does not rigorously argue for his contentions, but instead summarizes a book. Almost all of what he says about the class of managers running corporations and the state comes from James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. As Burnham saw matters, the separation of ownership and control in the modern corporation meant that managers no longer were bound by their fiduciary duty to the company’s shareholders. But, as Ludwig von Mises has taught us, so long as the owners can transfer their shares elsewhere, they retain ultimate control of the company. So far as the claim that the companies create demand for their products through advertising is concerned, one wonders how the companies contrive to do this. Wouldn’t it be easier to offer the products and services people actually want, rather than to endeavor to create a demand for products that doesn’t exist? This whole notion was criticized by F.A. Hayek in his classic paper, “The Non Sequitur of the ‘Dependence Effect’,” to which I refer readers interested for further details.

In his thinking about emergencies and sovereignty, Macintyre has been influenced by the controversial German jurist and Nazi Party member Carl Schmitt, who argued in The Concept of the Political that the sovereign is he who has the power to declare an exception (i.e., a state of emergency in which the rules are suspended). But why can’t people cope with emergencies as they arise, without specified procedures on what to do? Why do people need to involve the state at all, particularly when, as Macintyre is aware of and indeed emphasizes, those who declare emergencies are reluctant, to say the least, to give up their extra-constitutional powers? As he says about covid, “The experts who had locked down the entire country were drunk on the incredible power they had amassed in the space of only a few months and had no interest in letting it go.”