No, it can't be coercive, by definition. If a jury of your peers deems that you did not provide informed consent, then the contract is void. A contract cannot be deemed both coercive and valid under common-law/libertarian principles.
Coercion is when someone reduces your option set, by threatening violence (against the person or property of you or someone you love). An offer, that you are free to reject, and have the faculty to fully comprehend, cannot meet the definition of coercive.
As for selling yourself into slavery, that calls into question whether the you that exists today has a right to the you that exists in the future to the extent that the current you possesses a right to sell that you's liberty away, and I am fairly a certain a court would rule you don't.
But these extreme/fantastical scenarios are not what libertarians are arguing about. There are far more mundane examples of people's liberty being repressed by anti-libertarian laws, that anti-libertarian apologists cannot excuse, so they resort to these hyperbolic examples.
Your answer avoids the ethical dilemma by means of a technicality about temporal ownership; it's not a very good rebuttal. Also its just one example of how voluntary transactions can be coercive, here's a few more just off the top of my head:
- demanding sex in order to give an actress a part in a movie
- offering food to a starving man in exchange for his kidneys
- buying all the food in the market to drive up the price from people desperate to not die
It's a point about the ethics of exerting control over different versions of ourselves. It's not some procedural technicality.
>demanding sex in order to give an actress a part in a movie
There is nothing coercive about this.
>offering food to a starving man in exchange for his kidneys
Unless it's an emergency, where the starving man does not have the time to make/entertain offers on the wider global market, there is nothing coercive about this either.
In an emergency situation, different rules apply, as a consequence of the physical space we each take, which displaces others. This exclusionary effect creates a duty to render help in an emergency, as opposed to abusing one's position in such a situation to exploit others.
>buying all the food in the market to drive up the price from people desperate to not die
There is nothing coercive about this, and in practice, it's impossible. This should certainly be guarded against by individuals, through means like securing long-term food purchase contracts through co-ops, or by growing one's own garden, but that doesn't imply that it's a form of coercion which we have an ethical right to employ coercion to remedy.
I don't understand what your definition of coercion is, if withholding care upon receipt of payment is not coercive but demanding payment to avoid harm is. They're materially the same thing: you're paying to not die.
You can't really argue with deontological positions given they're axiomatic, so there's probably no reasoning I can give that you would consider.
>>if withholding care upon receipt of payment is not coercive but demanding payment to avoid harm is. They're materially the same thing: you're paying to not die.
Could you elaborate? What exactly do you mean?
By "withholding care upon receipt of payment is not coercive", do you mean a person that commits to providing aid in exchange for payment, and then reneges on their obligation upon receiving payment? This is clearly theft/fraud, and in the same class of behaviors as coercion.
I'm totally confused as I don't know when we discussed such a scenario and why you think that I don't consider that coercive.
I mean that the two cases below are materially the same:
- you get shot and I withhold my care based on a ruinous payment
- I threaten to shoot you unless you give me a ruinous payment
Obviously as you said these are morally different because I am acting aggressively - but this is not a utilitarian argument. In terms of utility (and i am a preference utilitarian, so that's what matters to me - rationalists typically claim the same framework) these two scenarios are identical, and thus have the same moral weight.
The latter, you have claimed as coercive, the former (eg withholding food from a starving man), you said was not. Therefore, your definition of coercion is not rooted in utility.
Like I said, in emergency situations different rules apply, based on the principle of the exclusionary effect I mentioned earlier.
The normal libertarian ethics don't apply in such cases. In the ordinary non-emergency market, Newtonian/libertarian ethics do apply, and those are the circumstances you are avoiding contending with by focusing on extreme outlier/edge cases.
I think these outliers demonstrate an inherent flaw in capitalism (among others) where power imbalances dictate capital accumulation. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer because the rich are in a better negotiating position so the poor must take what they're given. The obvious example being that workers must sell their labour while capitalists can buy labour and retain profit, leading to capital growth. Marx documented the tendencies of capitalism pretty well to be honest.
You don't seem to be engaging with the implications of what I'm saying, rather just engaging with the specific examples, so I'm not sure you're really willing to engage with the arguments.
>>I think these outliers demonstrate an inherent flaw in capitalism (among others) where power imbalances dictate capital accumulation.
These outlier situations have properties not present in normal circumstances, regardless of the power imbalance in those normal circumstances. Normal circumstances mean that Apple, despite being worth $2.8 trillion, can only induce me to purchase its product, if it is the best option for me amongst the entire set of options globally available to me. The harmful/coercive effect of the power imbalance vanishes in a free market, because by the ruleset of the free market, Apple cannot use its power to do anything except provide a better quality product for a lower price.
>> The rich get richer and the poor get poorer because the rich are in a better negotiating position so the poor must take what they're given.
The poor don't get poorer in a free market.. We've seen wages grow over 20 fold since 200 years ago, in 1822. This is after adjusting for inflation, meaning a greater than 20 times material improvement in people's living conditions. The places in the world with the highest wages are precisely those which adhered to the free market ruleset most closely, and for the longest duration of time.
>>You don't seem to be engaging with the implications of what I'm saying
Yes, apple does not have the power to not literally force you to do anything, which is an improvement over feudalism. However, if you take apple alongside all their inputs, what you have is an extractive model where shareholders capture the value created by employees and suppliers, and the employees of those suppliers are often the ones being ruthlessly exploited (the aforementioned cobalt miners, Chinese factory workers, etc). Nowadays the truly horrific exploitation is done abroad. The west barely does any material labour like resource extraction or manufacturing, we just shuffle paper around and live off capital extraction and admimistration.
> The poor don't get poorer in a free market..
Real wages in the USA have stagnated since the 1960s [1] as neoliberal (aka libertarian) policies have been implemented. The US has some of the worst rates of education, medical expense, and income inequality in the world. Many cities are unaffordable to the service workers and labourers that those cities require. At the same time, the value of real work being done is extracted from countries in the global South by neocolonial policies. That's not the kind of ethical ideal we should be aiming at.
>>Yes, apple does not have the power to not literally force you to do anything, which is an improvement over feudalism. However, if you take apple alongside all their inputs, what you have is an extractive model where shareholders capture the value created by employees and suppliers, and the employees of those suppliers are often the ones being ruthlessly exploited (the aforementioned cobalt miners, Chinese factory workers, etc).
The activity of Apple is massively beneficial to China, and the other suppliers downstream of it. You're simply accepting the Marxist principle that profit is exploitation, and harmful to society, which is not economically valid, and oblivious to the facts around the impact of foreign investment in countries like China.
>>Real wages in the USA have stagnated since the 1960s [1] as neoliberal (aka libertarian) policies have been implemented.
This is incredibly misinformed.
First of all, that link looks at wages, not compensation. The non-wage component of compensation has grown more rapidly than the wage component of compensation. Looking solely at wages, instead of compensation as a whole, is seemingly a deliberate choice to give people a sense of being victimized.
Second, the USA is NOT the world, and it has NOT implemented libertarian policies since 1960.
Market rights have been increasingly encroached upon since 1960, as a result of politically instituted government interventions, that according to basic economics, reduce productivity growth, exacerbate income inequality, or both.
To say nothing of the rapid expansion of the regulatory bureaucracy, and the barriers to competition it creates for major private sector incumbents, and highly paid consultants/lawyers/lobbyists who know how to navigate it.
2. The rapid increase in land-use restrictions in the major high-productivity population centers, which according to many analyses, has massively increased income inequality, while inhibiting productivity growth. E.g. this study estimates that reducing land-use restrictions in just three cities: New York, San Francisco and San Jose would increase GDP by 36.3 percent:
The world at large, which has moved more toward libertarianism since 1990, has seen the most rapid rise in wage growth in human history over the last 30 years:
I actually don't care about profit, I care about how it's distributed - it should be given to the people who generated it. That's not how capitalism works.
You can't honestly say that the Reagan era led to increases in regulation?
I don't support regulations uncritically, I think rent control plus NIMBYism is a disaster. You'd ideally want to build more accommodation, preferably apartment blocks over single family.
I'll admit I'm not a policy wonk so I don't know how non wage compensation plays into it. I do know that the American healthcare system is fucked and should be transitioned to a single payer system.
Your other comment about about cooperatives and labour rights was just the perfect market fallacy and completely a historical, respectively, so doesn't merit further analysis.
I've given so many examples of people being victimised in this thread, you just keep restating your opinions and moving on when I show my point so it's pretty clear you're unmovable in your ideology so there's no point continuing with this. I didn't engage with this thread to debate with libertarians when my established premise was that libertarians never move from their positions.
Like I said, your explanation for that not being how capitalism works, which was:
>>However, if you take apple alongside all their inputs, what you have is an extractive model where shareholders capture the value created by employees and suppliers, and the employees of those suppliers are often the ones being ruthlessly exploited (the aforementioned cobalt miners, Chinese factory workers, etc).
Is straight Marxist exploitation theory, and it's not grounded in the scientific consensus on Economics. It discounts the value of saving capital, and risking it on a venture, that the investor provides. It assumes wage earners do not benefit from profit-motivated investments, unless they share in the profits of the enterprise they are employed in, which is totally contradicted by basic economic theory, and a mountain of evidence of the last two hundred years.
>>You can't honestly say that the Reagan era led to increases in regulation?
The Reagan era experienced a quantifiable increase in regulations:
>>Supporters say the growing number of administrators is needed to keep pace with the drastic changes in healthcare delivery during that timeframe, particularly change driven by technology and by ever-more-complex regulations. (To cite just a few industry-disrupting regulations, consider the Prospective Payment System of 1983 [1]; the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 [2]; and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Act of 2009. [3])
Beyond federal regulations, state and local regulations increased as well. The land-use study I linked to earlier explains how much land-use restrictions, enacted at the local government level, have increased since 1960, and how much this has contributed to income inequality and productivity growth stagnation.
Those who benefit from centralized government control over society, e.g. the public sector unions and a fully unionized mainstream media, have completely taken over the narrative, and have convinced the masses that what the US experienced since 1960 was a move toward libertarianism.. It's an outrageous piece of misinformation/swindling-of-the-public.
>>Your other comment about about cooperatives and labour rights was just the perfect market fallacy and completely a historical, respectively, so doesn't merit further analysis.
> Is straight Marxist exploitation theory, and it's not grounded in the scientific consensus on Economics. It discounts the value of saving capital, and risking it on a venture, that the investor provides. It assumes wage earners do not benefit from profit-motivated investments, unless they share in the profits of the enterprise they are employed in, which is totally contradicted by basic economic theory, and a mountain of evidence of the last two hundred years.
There are multiple disciplines within economics that are divided along ideological lines - the discipline is generally more concerned with constructing models that reflect specific perspectives than trying to accurately predict market behaviour, and this is not surprising given the general unpredictability of markets. You can see this given that (let's momentarily discount Marxian economics) Austrian economics, Keynesianism and MMT are all considered variously "consensus economics" within different groups (and libertarians tend to favour Austrian economics while actual economists don't), clearly economics is not a hard science with decided models.
> The Reagan era experienced a quantifiable increase in regulations:
Bureaucracies are gonna create more rules over time, that's what they do, but I'm not making novel claims when I suggest that Reagan's economic policy was one of deregulation, lowering taxation, and shrinking the federal government. His deregulation was of a market form. Here, cited from Investopedia, a pro-capitalist site (that is broadly considered well-reasoned and unbiased): https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reaganomics.asp
> Those who benefit from centralized government control over society, e.g. the public sector unions and a fully unionized mainstream media, have completely taken over the narrative, and have convinced the masses that what the US experienced since 1960 was a move toward libertarianism.. It's an outrageous piece of misinformation/swindling-of-the-public.
Have you considered that perhaps it is you who has been misinformed?
> Pure Dunning-Kruger over-confidence.
Not a very convincing response in the face of literal historical revisionism. Child labour had to be outlawed. Cooperatives have a greater survival rate than corporations, but are rarely founded because generally speaking people who found companies want to get rich while actively avoiding giving their employees a share in the profits.
The paper notes that corporations can be converted to worker coops, but in actuality this rarely happens because workers don't have the capital to enact a buyout.
And with that, I'm done with this argument. I feel that my hypothesis that libertarians experience cognitive bias towards their ideology rather than taking an objective view of the arguments holds up, because you have continually shifted the goalposts and carved out exceptions where it's "not capitalism" due to emergency circumstances, despite the fact that capitalism is the economic system we operate within in every country on earth. Resorting to historical revisionism about child labour just shows me that you're constructing your conclusions first and making the facts fit that conclusion. Your arguments against left-wing analysis of capitalism have consisted primarily of pointing at the USSR and China, which does not address the critique of capitalism, it just creates a new critique of Leninism. Oh, and calling Marxist analysis "victimhood politics", which isn't an argument.
None of that is meant as an insult - we all have biases, but we should aim to examine them in order to more accurately assess our environments. That's the hypocrisy I find with rationalists being libertarians: they don't even approach Marxist critiques of capitalism, they just ignore them or attack strawmen in response. If you truly believe that capitalism is not meaningfully critiqued by leftists, you should be able to address their concerns directly, even steelmanning their positions.
>>There are multiple disciplines within economics that are divided along ideological lines - the discipline is generally more concerned with constructing models that reflect specific perspectives than trying to accurately predict market behaviour, and this is not surprising given the general unpredictability of markets.
But there is a mainstraem consensus, and Marxism is entirely outside of it. It is quack economics. For example, Marx believed that automation would reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages:
>>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?
and
>>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
He was an economically illiterate quack promoting basic fallacies like Ludditism that are popular with laymen.
>>Bureaucracies are gonna create more rules over time, that's what they do, but I'm not making novel claims when I suggest that Reagan's economic policy was one of deregulation, lowering taxation, and shrinking the federal government. His deregulation was of a market form. Here, cited from Investopedia, a pro-capitalist site (that is broadly considered well-reasoned and unbiased): https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reaganomics.asp
This is just the mainstream narrative. The real powers in society, which revolve around the state, have for 50 years, spun a narrative of an ascendant libertarianism (e.g. "neoliberalism"), when all broad-based measures of the centralization of society shows rapid transition to a more controlled and restricted market with more power in the hand of state bodies and industries tightly intertwined with them.
>>I honestly don't see how you can believe this. Unions are the weakest they've ever been, having shrunk alongside the middle class (no coincidence there):
The reason union membership rates declined is that unions bankrupted nearly every industry that was amenable to unionization. The union movement completely captured US industry and extracted exorbitant benefits that crippled the golden geese of the US economy.
The labor laws passed in the 1930s and 50s guarantee that any industry that does start to become a significant contributor to national output, whether it's the Big Three Auto Makers and the big steel manufacturers in the 1950s, or Tesla, Amazon and Google today, becomes the target of rent-seeking unions who are impossible to effectively resist thanks to the free-market undermining labor laws in place.
The decline in productivity growth, particularly in globally competitive markets like manufacturing, is a predictable consequence of that.
Beyond labor regulations, is the growth of government social welfare spending, at the behest of public sector unions who increasingly control the political system:
In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year, and the average government worker in California now makes over $140,000 a year:
California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers.
>>Not a very convincing response in the face of literal historical revisionism. Child labour had to be outlawed.
The historical revisionism + ideologically-motivated naivety is in thinking that child labor could be eliminated without the economic development that free market capitalism fostered.
Child labor laws only became practical when per capita GDP reached a level where prohibiting child labor wouldn't lead to an increase in people dying from privation. If you prohibited child labor in the poorest countries in the world today, you would cause an increase in malnutrition and extreme poverty, because productivity in those societies is so low that children working is often the only way every one in the family can afford to eat.
Child labor is also very different than most types of labor, in involving parties who cannot in many cases provide informed consent, so laws relating to it can be justified in a society based on voluntary interaction.
Focusing on child labor is another case of you focusing on an outlier scenario where libertarianism doesn't apply as a matter of principle, as you attempt to rationalize your anti-libertarian principles.
>>Cooperatives have a greater survival rate than corporations, but are rarely founded because generally speaking people who found companies want to get rich while actively avoiding giving their employees a share in the profits.
And you're completely ignoring/depreciating the significance of creating and expanding productive enterprises, which is what the market right to own a company as a founder and investor incentivizes and sustains. You will see dramatically less new business creation if you abolish these rights, for the sake of forcing society to use coops.
>>I feel that my hypothesis that libertarians experience cognitive bias towards their ideology rather than taking an objective view of the arguments holds up,
I spent many many years completely discounting what libertarians online had to say. I only feigned debate with them, when in reality I dismissed them as simplistic ideologues, blindly parroting a narrative concocted by corporate-owned think tanks and media (e.g. Fox News) to trick the masses into fighting against their own interests, and never actually evaluated their arguments with an open mind.
Libertarianism is actually just a basic understanding of economics, devoid of ideological narratives alleging exploitation in certain types of voluntary interaction, that are advanced to rationalize restrictions and special privileges imposed and bestowed by the state, respectively, to allegedly combat these invisible chains of oppression.
>>because you have continually shifted the goalposts and carved out exceptions where it's "not capitalism" due to emergency circumstances, despite the fact that capitalism is the economic system we operate within in every country on earth.
Arguing that market rights cease to apply in extreme circumstances for which market rights were not designed is entirely reasonable, and for you to critique capitalism, and argue for the social democratic anti-libertarian order, which in most countries of the world, gives the state control over at least 40 percent of the productive output via taxation and regulatory gatekeeping, based solely on appeals to these fantastical outlier scenarios, shows bad faith debating.
Ask the millions starving under communism then improving their lot under capitalism which system they prefer.
Debating the various theoretical aspects of various *isms is fun and all but there is practically no immigration from capitalism to communism. The poor know which one is better for them and vote with their feet.
You realise that even Lenin, piece of human filth that he was, didn't consider the USSR to be communism? That's just not what the word means. The USSR was (pick one):
- A Marxist-Leninist state
- State capitalism
- Bolshevism
I don't care much about the terminology, but I do care about people making out that most left-wingers want more USSR. I mean, I'm an anarchist, so if I were alive in the USSR I'd be murdered, so that should tell you the level of friendliness between those people and libertarian socialists.
Any society where Marxist doctrines came to predominate ended up suffering for it. We can quibble over what you call the USSR, but Marxism is simply a-economical, and causes unimaginable human suffering to the extent that laws are shaped by it.
You can literally just switch out corporations with cooperatives to make a market socialist economy. Marxist "doctrines" also led to 5 day 8 hour working weeks, paid leave, unions led to increased wages, and many other workers rights. Hell, before the left wing gained power, child labour was predominant in capitalist economies.
If cooperatives were as efficient as corporations, they would win out in the free market, with consumers choosing their products over those produced by corporations. Repressing the free market necessarily means preventing the most efficient means of production/coordination from becoming predominant, based on crude ideologically motivated narratives about how an economy is supposed to work.
>>Marxist "doctrines" also led to 5 day 8 hour working weeks, paid leave, unions led to increased wages, and many other workers rights. Hell, before the left wing gained power, child labour was predominant in capitalist economies.
No it didn't. All of those things emerged as a result of the rising levels of per capita GDP that were due to profit-motivated investment in a free market.
Child labor could only be abandoned when productivity increases enabled parents to support their whole family alone, and that productivity increase was, again, a consequence of profit-motivated investment in a free market.
>Coercion is when someone reduces your option set, by threatening violence (against the person or property of you or someone you love). An offer, that you are free to reject, and have the faculty to fully comprehend, cannot meet the definition of coercive.
In an economy that defines itself by a high degree of the division of labor, where people no longer gather their own food and are dependent on the cooperation of other people, being excluded from the division of labor is the same as ending their ability to participate in society. They must now scramble and get their own plot of land and work the fields themselves and become self sufficient. There are offers that people cannot refuse realistically.
I would count this as coercion because people who own money can refuse to spend it indefinitely. As money is needed to conduct transactions, it becomes harder and harder to trade the more people keep money for the sake of having money instead of using money exclusively as a medium of exchange as many economists (even Marx) postulate, even though it has been proven wrong hundreds of times.
A store of value cannot be used as a medium of exchange, those are two mutually incompatible and this conflict makes the money -> goods transaction inherently coercive, which ironically also backfires, because the only way you can beat coercion is through psychological manipulation. How do you convince someone to get something they don't need? By creating an artificial need.
>>In an economy that defines itself by a high degree of the division of labor, where people no longer gather their own food and are dependent on the cooperation of other people, being excluded from the division of labor is the same as ending their ability to participate in society.
No one has the power to exclude you from the market and the benefits of division of labor.. You would only be excluded if what you provide is of such little apparent value, that no one wants to trade what they have for what you provide. That is not coercion. People have a right to not associate with you, even if that choice means you starve to death. You do not own other people.
>>I would count this as coercion because people who own money can refuse to spend it indefinitely.
People can barter. People can create their own money. When the state, under anti-libertarian principles, intervenes, and prohibits voluntary exchanges involving certain kinds of money then yes, these problems can theoretically emerge. This is why libertarian philosophy is so adament about not using the state's apparatus of violence (the courts, police and prisons which compel compliance with state orders) to restrict people from engaging in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults.
Coercion is when someone reduces your option set, by threatening violence (against the person or property of you or someone you love). An offer, that you are free to reject, and have the faculty to fully comprehend, cannot meet the definition of coercive.
As for selling yourself into slavery, that calls into question whether the you that exists today has a right to the you that exists in the future to the extent that the current you possesses a right to sell that you's liberty away, and I am fairly a certain a court would rule you don't.
But these extreme/fantastical scenarios are not what libertarians are arguing about. There are far more mundane examples of people's liberty being repressed by anti-libertarian laws, that anti-libertarian apologists cannot excuse, so they resort to these hyperbolic examples.