coercion

 I argue with libertarians a lot, often in venues where the conversation isn't very productive. My greatest frustration is the selective definition of coercion and the refusal to grapple with what forces actually constrain liberty in the real world.

You've got to eat to live and got to work to eat. That's coercion. The fact that the coercion arises from a state of nature might mean that we can't blame anyone for the coercion itself, but it certainly doesn't prevent us from blaming those who exploit it. And capitalism doesn't just permit that coercion, it can't function without it. The distinction between someone who puts a gun to my head and says "you must work for me or die" (bad coercion, to libertarians) and someone who points to my certain starvation if I don't work and says "you must work for me or die" (good coercion, to libertarians) is almost entirely irrelevant to how I actually experience life and liberty. And the latter condition afflicts many millions of people. The reality of death due to starvation and exposure might be a state of nature but the exploitation of that state of nature to satisfy self-interest certainly is not. But this exploitation is at the very heart of the libertarian and capitalist project.

I can't be sure, but I believe that if you were to go around the world and ask all working people whether they would give up working if they could do so and still ensure the survival of their families, a huge number would stop working immediately. I doubt many people would disagree with me there. Textile workers in Indonesia and tungsten miners in Bolivia and part-time Walmart employees in the United States are likely not working because of love for the job. And if you define your politics as resistance to coercion, and you're willing to agree that millions of people would abandon their jobs if not for being coerced into them, well, that should be a huge, huge problem for you. Libertarians agree that the choice between "work for me or die" when physically threatened is not a real choice, but disagree that the choice between "work for me or die" when under the risk of physical death from circumstance is not a real choice. That does not seem remotely consistent or defensible to me. In order to defend it they build castles of theoretical and semantic differences that are not meaningful at all to the people making such choices in real life.

Libertarianism and capitalism seem like deeply incompatible systems to me. I don't expect libertarians to wholesale abandon either in response to this incompatibility. But you'd think that there would be a large, extended, and frequently unhappy conversation within libertarianism about the exploitation of coercion in the labor force, the way there is a large, extended, and frequently unhappy conversation within the left about markets and their use. From my outsider's perspective, any such conversation happens very rarely and in small forums that have little to do with libertarianism writ large.

My vantage is limited. But it seems to me that libertarian principles have huge consequences that are frequently in great tension with capitalism and totally antithetical to the desires of large corporations; libertarian discourse, in practice, is dominated by whining about tax rates on the wealthy and regulations that protect workers. I've read my Nozick and my Rand and my Hayek and yet find barely any consideration of the massive exploitation of the coercive state of nature in the libertarian media. When brought up, the topic is treated with the typical defensive snark. It's depressing, and given the tendency of libertarianism to devolve into a defense of the powerful at the expense of the powerless, it doesn't look good.