My dissertation explores the ascendancy of the U.S. private sector since the 1980s. Business interests and political ideology had fused into a political movement seeking to restore the bygone liberal economics of the pre-New Deal era by the 1970s, quickly finding success in undermining both organized labor and the state. In three essays, I focus on the effects of business interests organizing against organized labor and the state in a two-pronged front. By doing so, I am engaging in expansive literatures on private-sector union decline and the privatization of government services, two well-worn areas of research that I believe are lacking some theoretical depth due to methodological approaches that do not make full use of temporal information. To obtain new insights, I apply innovative time-series approaches to creating variables, employing econometric models, and using semiparametric techniques to identify nonlinear temporal dynamics. Chapter 1 studies the causes of U.S. union decline in 1973-2008, using locally-weighted error correction models to estimate not only the prominent explanations in existing literature, but also to unravel individual causes to find the time periods when each was most prominent. Chapter 2 establishes for the first time that privatization has reshaped employment in the U.S. before using unconditional quantile regression to identify the 2000-2018 negative effects of privatization on earnings across various points in the earnings distribution resulting from privatization. Chapter 3 establishes for the first time that privatization reshaped the U.S. government since the 1970s before using autoregressive distributed lag models to find that increased government contracting to private-sector industries has reshaped private-sector resource distribution, which includes increased corporate profits and dividends paid to shareholders. This dissertation makes literature advancements while also offering new operationalizations for future scholars. Overall, the findings demonstrate a profound shift in power and resource distribution within American society.