Coercion Versus Voluntary Means
Underlying debates among political philosophies and political economics is the distinction between coercive and voluntary actions. Daniel Klein defines the distinction between coerced and voluntary.
“You are coerced when someone brings physical aggression or threat thereof to your property. Your property is your stuff, including your person, and ownership implies a claim to your property good against the world. A claim, a benchmark, not an absolute or inviolable right.
Voluntary interaction is our consenting, in the absence of coercion, to alter our property arrangements and to form agreements such as contracts. As for who owns what, there are rather universal norms, beginning with the soul’s ownership of its person, extending to property acquired within the family and in trade, production, and gift relations.[5] Liberty is freedom from others messing with your stuff. Restrictions on voluntary interaction are diminutions of liberty.
Sure, there are holes and gray areas, and forms vary with social norms. But the basic ideas of tangible property, ownership, and consent are cogent and apply so widely that we may think of the exceptions as exceptions.”
Is It Important?
Some writers (for example, George Stigler and Gary Becker) hold the position that the distinction is either not important or not particularly useful given the complexities of our society, our wealth, concerns for efficiency, or utilitarian values of government action. But, of course, these arguments border on ignoring serious implications that arise from using some desirable end to justify a coercive means.
Given a political issue with desirable ends such as health care, the coercive/voluntary distinction operates at a deeper level within an ideology that apparently governs how people view facts, intentions, government actions, and results of various proposals.
The Problem of Force Posed
If modern day pro-government advocates are to justify government action in any political issue, they will have to tackle the implications of the distinction between coercive and voluntary action.
Here is how we might pose the liberal’s problem in making the moral case for coercion:
2. If in some circumstance we think it desirable to make one person a gainer at the expense of another person, is it then morally sound to use force to so do?
3. If rather than individuals, groups are involved—one group made a gainer at another’s expense—does using groups make using force more or less justified?
4. Does using government force make it more or less morally justified?
How Do Human Societies Construct Themselves?
While it may appear to some to be an esoteric, or perhaps useless philosophic point in discussions of “real” problems such as health care, the distinction between coercive and voluntary action goes to the heart of understanding how society constructs itself. How do we explain the development of society? What exactly is the source of social and psychological construction, the free activity of people or the activity of people controlled by some central plan, government, or god that subordinates activity to some higher ideal or common good?
In organizing our society, it would seem that how we explain how human activity can transcend itself to construct the new and better—whether that is social, economic, religious, psychological, technological, or even biological activity—would form a fundamental issue that underlies most of our problems in the world today, and it seems to begin with the distinction between whether some form of external control and therefore force is necessary or whether within human activity there exists some self-organizing and self-transcending factors at work and therefore free activity is necessary.
The Long-Term Consequences
Counter to this problem is the question of whether over the long run it is free activity or whether it is coercive methods that tend to produce destructive consequences and the direction each tends to move a society over the long term. However stated, the problem must not be ignored otherwise we will remain thoughtless in our political ideology and given to what is only intuitive or what merely feels good.
