What Coercion Is, and What It’s Not

Coercion means initiating physical force, or the threat of initiating physical force against another. Ever since Proudhon declared that “property is theft” (and likely before), there have been those that have tried to use semantics and mental gymnastics in order to describe their own perceived injustices as involuntary acts of coercion or force against them. As such, the words “coerced” “forced,” and “expropriated,” have been robbed from the very pages of Merriam-Webster in order to flesh out the philosophy of Marx-Engels. Yet, this seemingly common sense thought not only has merits on the basis of what the dictionary has to say. If one were to grant such proponents that the bastardization of the word “coercion” is applicable for the sake of argument, the conclusions such philosophical arguments lead to are contradictory.

Let’s start with the common “property is theft” argument put forward by the most hardcore socialists or communists. If the property is theft, how can anything be stolen in the first place? In other words, since the property is an inherently illegitimate institution, anyone who claims to be stolen from is implicitly making a claim to the property. Thus, no one was stolen from at all, since he who claims to have been stolen from actually hasn’t been stolen from because the coerced party can’t own property anyway. This is why the “property of theft” line of thinking is axiomatically false. In order to make a claim that “property is theft,” one has to acknowledge property in the first place.

Yet, the argument has been more or less been attempted to be wiggled out of in some instances. This is the arbitrary distinction between personal and private property. The argument is as follows, “personal property is a property that the owner has a personal relationship with, such as their clothes or food, and private property is the means of social production whose income is being kept from the rest of society.” However, if the “means of production” are indeed private property, then there can be no logical stopping point in the effort to separate private from personal. Every good or piece of property is a means of production. Humans act using means to achieve ends and satisfy some present state of uneasiness. For instance, your glasses and shoes can’t be called personal and logically separated from private property, as they allow you to produce more satisfaction for yourself, and achieve the ends more satisfactorily. The improved sight and foot protection are simply means to an end, and the end is increased production of satisfaction. A factory or a plot of land is also private property, as it allows shareholders (owners of the firm) to derive satisfaction from the land or factory by producing for consumers in exchange for money. While the ownership of the means of production does satisfy the wants of the capitalists, those satisfactions can only come about if the firm satisfies the wants of the consumers. From the point of view of a self-proclaimed and nominally altruistic socialist, one could argue that the private property of the capitalist does more social good than a simple pair of shoes that he or she owns. We can see how the separation of private property and personal property is not principled, but seems merely a justification for a young socialist to keep their iPhone and tax Apple for their free college too.

Another form of coercion that has been thrown about is the supposed existence of “mental coercion.” Since physical violence is the threat or carrying out of harming another, it can only happen if someone has the means to achieve that end. However, proponents of the mystical “mental coercion” try to show how a person who is seemingly smarter than another can trick them into buying their product, or fraudulently exploiting a weaker-willed buyer. Such arguments are also welcomed by the socialists, who see advertising as a waste designed to lure customers into buying one stick of deodorant over another when instead that money could be directed to helping those who are starving (see Sanders, Bernie). However, no matter how lacking mental capacity an actor is, they still are able to make the choice to buy or not to buy without the threat of physical force backing them up. It is not enough for the expert marketer to present his products’ case, the buyer must convince themselves that the price is worth the other opportunities forgone with what is given up. If the buyer buys free from the threat of physical violence (no matter their mental condition), they have not been coerced, but exercised their own free will in ex-ante anticipation of want satisfaction.  If the “mental coercion” argument, then, if it is a violation of a weaker party’s free will, would have to imply some sort of mystical mind control. If this was the case, no price of a Super Bowl commercial is too high to pay for the advertising of snake oil.

On a side note, if one makes the claim that mental coercion can’t be tolerated in society due to the inherent inequalities of mental capacity, one makes a claim that runs into itself. For this to be carried to its logical conclusion, no exchange of any kind can be tolerated. Since no two individuals possess the exact same capacity to make rational decisions and have the same prior experiences in life, there will always be an advantaged and disadvantaged party in any transaction. In order to remedy this, one person’s will or judgment of value must be transposed for the transacting parties. If one party wants to buy snake oil, the third party would have to say no using force and actual coercion as its backing. Thus, the elimination of “mental coercion” from society would require monumental amounts force and coercion to stamp out. I would call this cutting of your nose to spite your face.

Such mental coercion arguments don’t even address the fact that if a seller and a buyer both genuinely believe in the healing properties of snake oil, that no one has been coerced in the first place. Even if a buyer continually buys and suffers from some sort of psychological placebo affect that the remedy is working, the buying party continues to benefit until he or she believes otherwise. In order to eliminate mental coercion in this scenario, if it can even be said to have taken place at all, one would have to call for the forceful elimination of countless other institutions from society, say, the Church or Herbalife. Of course, the socialist would like nothing more but to see their own set of values as objective and scientific, and use a platform like a state to enforce their values on the rest of us.

Moreover, even if we suspect that the seller in question intends to defraud the buyer, the market is especially good at weeding out the ne’er-do-wellers. Ponzi schemes eventually implode (social security isn’t even safe), credit scores render nearly hopeless a consistently truant borrower’s ability to secure new loans, terrible eating establishments fall prey to the mighty Yelp, and who really still buys snake oil anyway? Genuine fraud itself could be said to be no different than theft, but trying to use the state (institutionalized coercion) to put a stop to such transactions beforehand “Minority Report”creates more heads on the hydra than it cuts. If fraud is not backed up by physical force, it falls prey to the profit/loss and customer satisfaction mechanisms of the marketplace. In fact, using coercion and violence to solve these problems creates more problems than it solves. The banning of products or practices, patenting, licensing, and compliance with laws on how or what not to sell renders the market in handcuffs as it attempts to weed out fraudulent or wasteful investments. Some transactions that the third party would deem unfair are actually transactions with risks worth taking. New businesses or products may not be created that don’t satisfactorily pass the arbitrary judge’s values, no matter if the selling firm and its customers are willing to take the risk. With government oversight, the same conclusions are reached with significantly higher overhead costs.

Still, some other proponents of the false-coercion doctrines would have us believe that since everyone has the right to life, that they have the right to earn a living. While this is true, that one owns themselves and their right to produce unhindered by any outside force, the argument is twisted into meaning that the workers have a right to a job. Sometimes this line of thinking doesn’t go far enough for the worker, in fact, they believe that they aren’t just entitled to a job, but a higher wage. The fact that the subsistence wage (which well below today’s minimum wage) is not the living (arbitrarily comfortably) wage is beside the point here. The point that is stressed by this view’s champions is the fact that if it is a right, then having to work for less than what they would like otherwise is some form of coercion.

This view is most absurdly illogical. Suppose there are three people on an island: A, B, and C. A arrived with a coconut in her possession, B a carrot, and C with a pair of headphones. If A and B trade coconut for carrot, the fact that C is unprepared to deal with the realities of being stranded does not make the coconut-carrot trade coercive. Neither A nor B forcibly took what they had from C in the first place, and the trade between A and B doesn’t forcibly render C’s situation any worse than it already was. C’s right to life and property is not C’s right to take from A or B; it is the right of C to keep the fish that he might catch, instead of waiting to be provided with A or B’s property. If C were to take half of A’s coconut without her permission, C’s perverted and misunderstood “right to life” has undoubtedly infringed upon A’s right to life. This simple demonstration goes to show that rights can only be rights and universal if they can be exercised and enjoyed universally. With the voluntary trade, no one has been stolen from, and all natural rights can be observed simultaneously. However, stating that one has a right to be provided with something necessarily imposes an obligation upon another human being, and in this scenario, that other human being’s rights have been subverted under another’s, and not all rights can be exercised simultaneously.

C’s claim and that of the worker that they have a right to use the state to violently grant them, through enforcement of law, association with whatever business does not bypass coercive forces. It creates them. Attempts to explain situations like this as “market failure in need of state intervention” are similarly unfounded. It’s not a market failure when one isn’t provided automatically with what one subjectively desires in their dreams. Is it a market failure that I don’t own a Lamborghini? If the market doesn’t reward an activity, it is the market telling the producer that their resources are better employed somewhere else.

There can be no excuse for those that want to take the word “force” or coercion in order to justify the things that they personally or arbitrarily want to impose upon society for their own subjective benefit. I digress. Coercion can only mean the use of force or the threat of violence upon non-compliance. Even if we were to accept multiple definitions of the word “coercion,” all other definitions would logically run into themselves, fall apart, and contradict reality and natural law. In conclusion, any definition of coercion that is not restricted to violence and the threat of such should be thrown into the garbage and set on fire, never to be used again.

The post What Coercion Is, and What It’s Not appeared first on LewRockwell.