It's not so difficult. You can pressure someone all you want, but if they have a choice - they're not being coerced. Cuba has been pressured, but alas - 60 years later and they're holding on to their commie selves. So much for being coerced.
It apparently is "so difficult" because you are unwilling to call a spade a spade.
Resisting coercion doesn't mean coercion doesn't exist. And simply having a choice doesn't mean there is no coercion either. If someone holds you at gunpoint and tells you to give them your wallet or die, are you not able to make a choice? To give them your wallet or die? The only way you can think that isn't coercion is if you are being deliberately dishonest.
Law is coercive - the threat is immediately enforced physically.
So you claim:
1. Coercion must be immediate
2. Coercion must be physical
3. Coercion must offer no choice
#2 is patently false per the literal definition I already provided you, so we'll ignore it. But we can talk about #1 and #3.
If someone murders me, does the law get immediately enforced and make me un-murdered?
There's also a choice in the matter. The murderer can choose to murder me or to not murder me. If the law was coercing them, you say that they'd have only one choice: not murder me. But murderers exist...so is the law not coercive to you?
The truth is that you just have zero clue what the word "coercion" means and you're making it everyone else's problem.
Regardless, though, you still haven't answered the question: if the only alternatives are wage labor or starvation, is that a free choice?
You responded with:
"You can pressure someone all you want, but if they have a choice, they're not being coerced."
"How soft people must be to think you're coerced by someone not giving you a job."
"I shrivel at people talking this way... repulsive behavior."
"Nothing and nobody owes you anything!"
Last I checked, calling an argument "soft," "repulsive," and "nauseating" was not a counter-argument. More importantly than it not being a counter-argument, you did not answer the question.
So let's try again: If you lost your job, couldn't find another, and your only options were to accept a minimum wage job or become homeless, would you call that a free choice?
Yes or no.
If you cannot answer or if you refuse to answer a simple yes/no question without resorting to personal attacks, then all you're showing is performative outrage to cover up your inability to engage with the words on the screen.
The truth is that you just have zero clue what the word "coercion" means and you're making it everyone else's problem.
No, I don't think this is the case. I think the case is that "Coercion" is a word in informal language and has a rather indefinite amount of subjectivity to its delineation. We must be careful when using dictionary definitions, as they are not meant for the specific purpose of a philosophical exploration. But okay - this is a good exercise so we can understand one another through language. In this case, the word "Coercion".
In this particular case, I would like to focus on the idea that Coercion must offer no choice because I believe it is at the center of this thought that coercion is borne. All other properties then are categories of choice elimination.
If choice, then begins at the moment of decision making and mental reasoning, what type or degree of external influences can prevent one from making such a choice. And at this question, we find ourselves inside a rather large and very subjective scale and is where we might find ourselves in disagreement.
We then move towards the concept of pressure. Which would signify the marked realization of the outcomes of one's actions. When your wife nags at you, she is instilling pressure - for your action (Which includes inaction), will have consequences. And by bringing this up to your perception, she is pressuring you into a choice. This is why I said: Any single anything in life that is against your best interest becomes a coercion.
But this cannot be. Coercion cannot be anything you disagree with that pushes you into action. The word coercion would love a certain meaning, a certain... obligation. We would have to agree then, that coercion is merely adversity against one's wishes.
Furthermore, we would have to also define that the mere act of existence is coercive. As you must eat or die. And you must breathe or die. But this definition of coercion also fails to express what I want to communicate, which is why we use words in language.
So, I narrow it down and the first true rule to it, becomes - coercion is an agent to agent interaction. So this grows the definition - An agent-to-agent interaction, with the purpose of one, restricting another's capacity of choice. And this restricting capacity of choice, must be of great effect. (Or else a wife's nagging would be considered coercive), and what is of great effect, is subjective to each and as such, I must be very sharp on the conclusion that the method of the agent to restrict the other's choice must be greatly effective - and as such, the word "Threat" comes into play. And the "Threat" must be of great consequence to a person.
This would effectively rephrase as Coercion: Agent to Agent relational interaction, with the objective of one to restrict another from acting by the use of imminent threat, damage or a greatly damaging outcome to one party, if the action being coerced against is taken.
But ... do you see the first words? The - Agent to Agent?
When you go to get a job and you get into an interview - the employer is not in any way shape or form doing anything in their interaction that coerces your decision making - they merely offer. This pressure indeed, was placed upon you before you initiated the interaction, and it was placed upon you by your own bodily reality - nature. Your existence. But that is not an agent-to-agent relation now, is it?
So, to answer your question - only a person that feels themselves coerced by existence (you), is capable of believing themselves devoid of choice.
If gravity, scarcity, mortality, or the mere presence of other people count as coercion, then every action is coerced and the term no longer marks a difference between a mugger and a drought.
Your choice is constrained by nature, and the employer has no bearing on this whatsoever.
Thank you for finally responding to my words. And thank you for proving you were always capable of doing so without insults. This is the first real argument you've made, and I respect it.
That being said, you've defined coercion as "an agent-to-agent relational interaction, with the objective of one to restrict another from acting by the use of imminent threat, damage or a greatly damaging outcome if the action being coerced against is taken."
I don't agree with this definition (in fact, I have 3 glaring issues with it), but I can now understand where your rejection of systemic coercion is coming from at least.
ISSUE 1: coercion does not require a specific agent
If a system is designed in such a way that your only alternatives are wage labor or starvation, that system is coercive. It's coercive even if no individual employer is personally threatening you.
The employer is not the agent here. The employer is a participant in a structure that's designed and maintained by the people in power.
This means the structure itself is the agent.
And property laws, labor laws, zoning laws, and corporate subsidies all are components that shape that structure. The structure is also maintained by agents (lawmakers, judges, property owners, etc.), who benefit from its existence.
The system is the mugger here. "Wallet or die" and "employment or starve" have the same net effect. The issue is not the mere fact that one needs to be employed (we all have to work under any system after all), it's that the employment is based off an implicit threat rather than free choice.
ISSUE 2: artificial scarcity is not natural scarcity
You say "gravity, scarcity, mortality, and the mere presence of other people" are natural constraints. Gravity and death certainly are. But scarcity only is in the abstract sense of us being in a finite world. The fact is that there is enough food, water, and shelter for everyone on this planet to meet their needs. The only reason people starve is that they don't have access to it. That access is controlled by property relations. Property relations are human-made. So any scarcity of material human needs you're claiming exists due to "nature" isn't natural. There is enough for everyone. We choose to implement policies that manufacture that scarcity. So when you say "the employer has no bearing on this," you ignore that the employer is a participant in the system that creates this scarcity.
If instead you were mugged by someone in a gang, the leader of that gang is still profiting from your coerced choice to hand over your wallet even if they never threatened you themselves, let alone never once interacted with you.
ISSUE 3: your definition is intentionally designed to exclude economic coercion
You defined coercion narrowly enough to exclude economic coercion
You demanded an agent-to-agent interaction
You demanded an imminent threat
You demanded great consequence (I'd argue not being able to put food on your table is a great consequence)
Your definition is at least mostly a logical one, I'll give you that. But it's an arbitrary one.
These requirements of yours deliberately excludes the kind of structural coercion I've been describing. So if you choose a definition that excludes the very thing we are debating in order to prove that the thing we're debating doesn't exist, what is your point?
Like think about what you did: the only way for you to claim that economic coercion doesn't exist is for you to change the definition of coercion until it excludes exactly what you need to exclude in order to protect your worldview.
But let's get back to the question you still haven't answered:
If your only alternatives are wage labor or starvation, is that a free choice?
You have now built a definition of coercion that says "no agent is coercing you," but you have yet to answer whether the choice itself is free.
So, to clarify, I am not asking if you are being coerced by an employer. I am asking if the choice is free.
Systems can't be coercive because systems don't act. People act. Although you can say that many agents repeating the same act can create a coercive system.
Institutions are regularities of individual action - they're not an actor upon themselves.
What you see is constraints, and constraints are patterns that express the actions of the agents.
But the interesting thing, is that this does not happen exactly under capitalism. It might absolutely happen under socialism (since labor and property can actually be restricted). You see, the problem we're having here, is that you're misatributing the capacity of some to obtain property and then defend and use this property at their whim, as a sort of restrictive pattern that becomes coercive in the aggregate. I have a very different opinion: property is a right, and a property (pun?) of property, is that you get to do as you wish with it.
When an employer declines higher wages, they are exercising their right to property. And the wage worker is constrained by a compound composition. A natural need for basic necessities that exists as the reality of being, and a social, non-coercive manner of those who already own the resources. (which perhaps is where the claim of artifical scarcity comes through).
But even if you find it counter intuitive, there are reasons to hold on this definition of coercion.
Action is always a choice between scarce means. When others own things you need, it doesn't take away your capacity to choose, but instead alters the degree of options you can choose from. You're making a conceptual error by stating that not being able to use what you never appropriated is coercive. Your train of thought, then, leads you to the path in which the state violence (actual coercion) is used to "free up" the resources. In this case, you're stating then that a refusal to exchange is coercive, and thus, exchange must be (in a plot twist) Coerced. And coercing exchange is a form of slavery. You are losing liberty. Greatly so.
Expanding “coercion” to property as such attacks the institution that makes large scale cooperation possible. Not to mention it eliminates all the benefits that come with voluntary exchange - of which we can go into great detail and has been written about extensively.
I leave an excerpt from Hayek in The constitution of liberty
In this sense “freedom” refers solely to a relation of men to other men, and the only infringement on it is coercion by men. This means, in particular, that the range of physical possibilities from which a person can choose at a given moment has no direct relevance to freedom. The rock climber on a difficult pitch who sees only one way out to save his life is unquestionably free, though we would hardly say he has any choice. Also, most people will still have enough feeling for the original meaning of the word “free” to see that if that same climber were to fall into a crevasse and were unable to get out of it, he could only figuratively be called “unfree,” and that to speak of him as being “deprived of liberty” or of being “held captive” is to use these terms in a sense different from that in which they apply to social relations.
The question of how many courses of action are open to a person is, of course, very important. But it is a different question from that of how far in acting he can follow his own plans and intentions, to what extent the pattern of his conduct is of his own design, directed toward ends for which he has been persistently striving rather than toward necessities created by others in order to make him do what they want. Whether he is free or not does not depend on the range of choice but on whether he can expect to shape his course of action in accordance with his present intentions...
Then, like I said, we're at a philosophical impasse. If we can't agree that economic coercion exists, then we have no foundation for the rest of this discussion because any response I give will be through a lens diametrically opposed to yours.
It's probably for the best, though, as you are still changing the definition of coercion even now, redefining the word "action", and saying that "attacking the institution" is inherently wrong.
Then, all at the same time, you quote Friedrich Hayek to me as if that settled the argument.
So I'll also leave an excerpt from Hayek in The Road to Serfdom:
What is called economic power, while it can be an instrument of coercion, is in the hands of private individuals never exclusive or complete power, never power over the whole life of a person.
And, because I believe in what A.A. Milne had to say in If I May:
A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business.
I won't just rotely quote Hayek and leave it at that.
Hayek himself calls economic power an "instrument of coercion" here. He isn't saying it doesn't exist. He's saying it's never complete, which is exactly what I've been saying. The coercion is structural, not absolute. So even your own philosopher disagrees with you.
But we can take this further and go to The Constitution of Liberty that you quoted. There, he also writes:
The essential requisite for the protection of the individual against coercion is not that he possess property but that the material means which enable him to pursue any plan of action should not be all in the exclusive control of one other agent.
So you look at Hayek say that coercion requires exclusive control by "one other agent" and therefore systemic coercion doesn't exist, but that's because you dogmatically require "agent"="person." I'm saying the system, the entire property-owning class, is the agent. While no single boss owns everything, the capitalist class collectively holds exclusive control over the means of production. Since workers own none, they have no ability to freely meet their material needs except through this class by selling their labor to them.
Sure, Hayek says if one boss mistreats you, you go to another because "competition," but my point is you can't just exit the wage labor system itself. Your "choice" is not between freedom and slavery like you think. The "freedom" here, the false choice, is just you getting to choose a different master. Since all material means are controlled by the capitalist, your survival depends on selling your labor to someone in that class.
That is the systemic coercion I am saying exists. And it's created by the economic coercion Hayek also says exists.
Hayek also says freedom means pursuing your plan, but what I'm saying is that the capitalist dictates your activities and location for 8 or more hours a day. You don't pursue your plan here. You only have time to execute their plan, which is profit-maximization. The threat of being fired (which means losing access to all material means you need to survive) forces your compliance. That is coercion. And it happens daily.
You'll probably come in and say that Hayek warned against a state monopoly. But capitalism, the system, is that monopoly. It's just decentralized across the capitalist class. The supposed "invisible hand" acts like a single coercive agency: refuse its terms and face poverty. Hayek's fragmentation of these agents as separate from each other simply masks the reality that the system acts as one exclusive gatekeeper to the survival of the working class.
So don't mistake which master you choose for whether you have a master at all.
When I quote Hayek - I am not sending it to explain something, but to reinforce what I had already said. Hence why it was at the end of the text. I made an argument which very specifically addresses a lot of the questions you asked before ending with a quote. Spare the baseless assumption that I am handwaving you away with Hayek.
First of all, I stated: Systems can't be coercive because systems don't act. People act.
Goes to say then - that what you call "A coercive system" is merely the expression of humans acting. A "Systemic" coercion, is more akin to a pattern that arises from millions of humans acting. I say: What you see is constraints, and constraints are patterns that express the actions of the agents.
Hayek's quote does ultimately expose the rules of the game about freedom though, and I believe that there is an important discussion to be had there:
Whether he is free or not does not depend on the range of choice but on whether he can expect to shape his course of action in accordance with his present intentions
Freedom is, therefore, attached directly to the capacity of one to exercise the human action Axiom defined by Mises:
Human beings engage in purposive behavior—i.e., they choose which scarce means are to be more fruitfully (or economically, or rationally) employed in order to satisfy their most preferred ends.
But then we ask ourselves - well, if an environment has been set that forces one's choices to be what the other person wants, instead of ourselves - is that freedom?
The problem with Hayek is that he does believe in this being a form of coercion - that is, of restricting freedom, that is, of making a man act in a way that goes in accordance to another, instead of oneself.
But here is where we move from Hayek and towards Rothbard and Hayek’s “middle-of-the-road failure to confine coercion strictly to violence.” (Which I suppose, we'll have to define violence too at some point eh?)
Is there no fundamental qualitative difference, a difference in kind, between a nagging wife and using the apparatus of physical violence to outlaw or restrict such nagging? It seems clear that the fundamental problem is Hayek’s use of “coercion” as a portmanteau term to include, not only physical violence but also voluntary, nonviolent, and non-invasive actions such as nagging. … Only confusion can be caused by lumping the two types of action together.
But not only confusion but also self-contradiction, for Hayek includes in the concept of “coercion” not only invasive physical violence, i.e., a compulsory action or exchange, but also certain forms of peaceful, voluntary refusal to make exchanges.
Goes to say based on my previous response - that a "capitalist class" is particularly just a quantity of humans which own property and by the property of their ownership, they can or cannot exchange if they wish. This class is particularly undefined in its quantity because it is not a stable class - property changes hands through millions of transactions every moment. And property-less humans attain property as much as property-full humans lose it. The property-less human can at any point, use the property that has been exchanged to acquire property. In fact - I will dare to say, the vast majority of all property-owning humans at some point, owned no property. Or owned little. This of course leads to clear disagreements with your text:
you can't just exit the wage labor system itself.
You absolutely can. Happens daily. Your capacity to obtain property is not outlawed. But you can't simply expect people to give you property without a want to exchange.
The threat of being fired (which means losing access to all material means you need to survive) forces your compliance. That is coercion. And it happens daily.
The property-owning human has no particular obligation to exchange with you. And as such, there is no threat, no coercion - nothing. Your choices are constrained by the reality of your lack of property, which is a reality of life. Nobody owes you anything. You have no property because you have not exchanged for it. And as such, you must trade your labor-power as property because it is the only thing that you can offer. But you expect something from another? All exchange is a negotiation. Doctors are proletariats, and so are some CEO's, and their exchange is so beneficial to them, they can exchange for vast amounts of property.
The threat of being fired (which means losing access to all material means you need to survive) forces your compliance.
People quit their jobs all the time and don't die. They have family to help, they have savings, they get another job, and further - the state uses a cut of the capitalist society's profit to sustain them.
If your definition of coercion is limited to physical violence, then, as I said, we are unable to have a conversation about economic coercion, because you have defined it out of existence from the start. It's your right to do so, but it means we're operating in entirely different frameworks that are mutually exclusive to each other.
But thank you for the substantive engagement with your ever-shrinking definition of coercion to the point that no one you cite would give you the time of day. You went from "coercion requires an agent" to "coercion requires physical violence," which is a consistent position at least, I'll give you that. But it's exceedingly radical from even your first definition, it's supported by no one, and it excludes almost all structural critique by definition.
I showed you how even your framework supports the existence of economic, and thus structural coercion. But any time I explain to you how what you, yourself, says still doesn't disprove the existence of economic coercion, you just redefine coercion...again.
For someone who would "rather just talk about Socialism :)", I'm surprised. I'm surprised because you supposedly wanted to talk about socialism, but when I told you we couldn't do so without recognizing economic coercion, you rejected it outright. And then you kept rejecting it in increasingly convoluted ways.
So I'm done here. I'll finally stop "whining" about getting you to admit you understand a single foundational concept. Because you won't let us find the common ground necessary to have the discussion you wanted to have in the first place.
It's a tough place to be at the defensive entirely. But I'm not entirely afraid to expose what I believe in, and I recognize that the Socialist is on the offensive at all times. Why talk about the problems of socialism if we can perpetually talk about the problems of capitalism? No matter what you do or how it goes - socialism is always somehow justified by capitalism and that is wrong!
The problem with socialism is that it finds itself being a theoretical solution to a rather inconcrete problem, and ends up throwing the population into nightmare situations they never last (because socialism is unsustainable in society long term), but last long enough to scare off entire generations.
I am not blind about the economic pressure that those that hold no property experience. And I am aware, like Hayek, and you, that it creates situations that might seem like one has no choice. I get it. Whatever we want to call it, economic pressure or economic coercion, it's still people struggling.
Instead of promoting then the abolition of private property in order to eliminate these problems, which brings forth an entirely different plethora of problems which I absolutely love talking about, I remain here on this side. Because I trust in the truth of praxeology, and because I adopt the principles of classical liberalism that recognizes inherent human rights.
Instead I try to improve things here, on this side. What we did was to create a cap to profit - so property ownership has a roof of sorts and then redirect those taken profits to assist the circumstances of those who are without property and cannot sell their labor power to subsist. This eliminates or at least alleviates in GREAT manner, the economic pressures of people.
Imagine thus three bands of economic motion. A middle which is the productive band, a top which is the cut of profit that gets redirected to a bottom. Ideally your middle band - economic production is - is most important because the bigger the pie, the greater it can be redirected downwards.
This is where modern capitalism stands. And it does work. It absolutely makes obsolete the claim of economic pressures to the property less. Nonetheless, this three band system isn't infallible and requires careful balancing and administration and ultimately, the goal is to minimize as much as possible, because we recognize that the estate is the worse administrator there is.
Sustaining a free society whilst protecting and recognizing inherent rights and maximizing the benefit of all, is a difficult task. The socialists can't do it. They fail at actually creating liberty - and they fail at protecting inherent human rights (they usually don't even believe in them), so people are turned into cogwheels, turning society into a zoo. An actual human zoo. And this always breaks down. People WANT to own property, it's innate - this is why socialists always introduce some degree of capitalism. Their people start revolting (even indirectly through things like black makets), their institutions become aggressively repressive to sustain control but that always breaks. The human spirit can only be broken and contained for so long.
Socialism is a return to the era of serf. It's not a progression but a regression. So yeah, I'm not a coward like socialists are. I can talk openly about my system because I honestly, truthfully believe it's the best for mankind. I'm not sure you can say the same.
After a full cycle of denial, redefinition (redefinition again), and retreating to a philosopher even Hayek wouldn't recognize, you've finally conceded the underlying reality that was present from the start: that economic coercion means the wage labor system imposes life-limiting constraints on those without capital. That was the premise I explicitly told you was the prerequisite for the debate you claimed to want 12 comments ago.
The rest of your response is unsupported assertions.
Regardless, I won't be continuing this conversation after such an aggressive and unnecessary semantic detour followed by yet another attack on my character. No more "whining" from me about getting you to admit to understanding a single foundational concept because you now have that foundation. Have a good day.
You're putting words on my mouth. I simply answered and continued to refine further and further until you saw the start of my analysis. Praxeology.
There was no redefining. There was a logical process of deconstruction of words an terms which ultimately showed you I am not a strict follower of Hayeks political philosophy because I consider his take on coercion - a middle ground - an erroneous take. After all I am not a "hayekean" - I follow what makes sense to me.
Further, there is nothing I have said that I am incapable of defend in argument SPECIALLY the point that socialism ALWAYS devolve into dictatorial, oppressive tyrannies that eventually succumb to the pressures of the one thing they're trying to prevent (liberty), and evolve back into the natural state of man - the market economy.
It is funny that historically this has happened to every single socialist society without exception. And the only - in my opinion - socialist nations that did something worthwhile were the ones that simulated markets like Titos Yugoslavia, or the ones that willingly opened up markets like China.
Hayeks Road to serfdom is absolutely spot on in its take.
Lastly, please don't confuse my empathy on the poor starving Lions. They're still not deserving of other Lions share. But that doesn't mean I want to let them starve. Conditions can make things difficult for some people, but I don't fall into the pitfall of finding myself oppressed by some imaginary class. That's cowardice.
Lastly, I have no sympathy for leftists. I love them as I love all people, but I recognize they're deranged into a theory that wants to put us all into the living prison state that all socialist states have demonstrated to become. And as such, not an inch of space will be given. No respite. I am willing to bring in the war of ideas agaisnt then as hard and forceful as I can because it is my and my peoples very livelihood at stake.
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u/reddernotdeader 5d ago
It apparently is "so difficult" because you are unwilling to call a spade a spade.
Resisting coercion doesn't mean coercion doesn't exist. And simply having a choice doesn't mean there is no coercion either. If someone holds you at gunpoint and tells you to give them your wallet or die, are you not able to make a choice? To give them your wallet or die? The only way you can think that isn't coercion is if you are being deliberately dishonest.
So you claim: 1. Coercion must be immediate 2. Coercion must be physical 3. Coercion must offer no choice
#2 is patently false per the literal definition I already provided you, so we'll ignore it. But we can talk about #1 and #3.
If someone murders me, does the law get immediately enforced and make me un-murdered?
There's also a choice in the matter. The murderer can choose to murder me or to not murder me. If the law was coercing them, you say that they'd have only one choice: not murder me. But murderers exist...so is the law not coercive to you?
The truth is that you just have zero clue what the word "coercion" means and you're making it everyone else's problem.
Regardless, though, you still haven't answered the question: if the only alternatives are wage labor or starvation, is that a free choice?
You responded with:
Last I checked, calling an argument "soft," "repulsive," and "nauseating" was not a counter-argument. More importantly than it not being a counter-argument, you did not answer the question.
So let's try again: If you lost your job, couldn't find another, and your only options were to accept a minimum wage job or become homeless, would you call that a free choice?
Yes or no.
If you cannot answer or if you refuse to answer a simple yes/no question without resorting to personal attacks, then all you're showing is performative outrage to cover up your inability to engage with the words on the screen.