[hurin]

That's a narrow way of looking at it. More likely rule by government will simply be replaced with rule by cooperations (e.g. Gibson's trilogy) - it's not an unexpected movement since the role of governments has weakened significantly since the time when a large standing army in Europe gave dominance to a nation.

Will it be worse for the average person/family? Probably, yet I tend towards seeing it as a natural historical movement rather than some kind of craftily-perpetrated evil. For example Spengler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler) writes about the dominance of money and commercial interest as being the primary value at the aged point of a civilizations development (cf. the last couple centuries of ancient Rome).