First off, I agreed with Kent's assessment that what you do on your own time, on your own property, is none of your boss's business. I also agree that your boss has the formal right to fire you for any reason he chooses. But you're not obligated to tell him the truth about what you do on your own time, or who you associate with, or anything else that's none of his business. I've lied on every one of those friggin' personality tests I ever took to get a job. If my boss wants to pry into my ass, he'll have to do it without my help.

More fundamentally, though: I said the boss has a *formal* right to fire you. But the proper question is not, as framed by debates between right-wing style libertarians and big government liberals, whether the government should be able to permit your boss to impose demeaning conditions of employment. The proper question to ask is, what kind of allegedly "free market" allows it? Why are we so dependent on wage labor in the first place, and so desperate to take a job on any terms, that we accept such demeaning conditions?

I would argue that government has played a massive role in recent centuries in reducing the bargaining power of labor, by shifting ownership of the means of production from working people to the rich (Enclosures and other land robberies), enforcing artificial property rights and scarcity that make capital expensive and difficult for ordinary people to obtain, enforcing regulations and licensing that erect barriers to small-scale production using spare capacity in the capital goods that ordinary people own anyway, etc.

As for whether hierarchies like those inside the corporation are evil as such, I'd have to say yes. They should not be forcibly suppressed or forbidden. And even in a free society, they might be chosen when their evils are outweighed by other evils, or by their increased efficiency benefits in some limited cases. But they're still evil as such. The reason they're evil is what Charles Johnson and Matt Mackenzie, in their work on Thick Libertarianism, call "entailment thickness." Most libertarians don't adopt libertarianism because they were first converted to the nonaggression principle, and then deduced the rest of the program from that principle. They come to libertarianism, and are exposed to and persuaded by the nonaggression principle, because they are first drawn to the philosophy by its resonance with general cultural values they already hold. And I would argue that even voluntary hierarchy and authority should be repugnant to libertarians, for the very cultural reasons and personal values that drew them to libertarianism.

Hierarchy promotes a culture of obedience and command, of submission to authority, that cannot be compartmentalized in the workplace. A person who spends half his working hours internalizing that culture of deference in the workplace, and seeing his material security and survival as dependent on submitting to and pleasing someone else, substituting the authority figure's priorities and judgments for their own, etc., is extremely unlikely to possess the character traits required for resisting the claims of authority outside the workplace.

It was for this reason that the founding generation so feared standing armies. Not just that they would be used against the civilian population. But that they would be a "school for slaves," that they would cultivate an internal culture of authoritarianism that was inimical to the values of the surrounding societies.