In libertarian argument as presented on The Bob Zadek Show, coercion is the central wrong that distinguishes government action from other social activity. Bob Zadek frames government as the only institution permitted to use force, so that whenever government acts it is using force and coercion Matt Zwolinski on Bleeding Heart Libertarianism (2014). Matt Zwolinski agrees that the paradigmatic case of coercion is the state pointing guns at people’s heads, but he hesitates to grant that government is the only institution authorized to use force, and argues that private coercion is something libertarians should find equally troubling. The concept is thus treated both as a limit on state power and as a problem that can arise wherever power is concentrated.
Coercion and the state
Zadek’s formulation is that the only distinguishing factor separating government from any other social institution is that government is the only institution permitted to use force; when we talk about government doing something, we are talking about force and coercion Matt Zwolinski on Bleeding Heart Libertarianism (2014). Zwolinski calls this an absolutely vital fact to remember when thinking about government, while noting his hesitation about the claim that government alone is authorized to use force. On this account, coercion is not incidental to government but constitutive of it: to say the government does something is to say it uses violence or force to get people to do what it thinks they ought to do.
The same framing recurs in the discussion of North Korea. Zadek says that it is only when government suppresses free markets with a gun that free markets do not exist, and that to the extent one tries to change or prevent people’s natural cooperation, one has to do it by force Yeonmi Park – North Korean Defector: “Juche” Die, Markets Rise (2014). He defines a free market as two people entering into a transaction that benefits both, with mutual benefit and no coercion, and treats the word “free” as important precisely because it means what people do without coercion and without force. Yeonmi Park agrees with his characterization that human nature drives people toward a free market system.
Coercion in private relationships
Zwolinski argues that libertarians sometimes make the mistake of thinking that if we are worried about preventing coercion or force, all we have to worry about is government coercion and force. He maintains that there is such a thing as private coercion and force too, and that libertarians should find it equally troubling Matt Zwolinski on Bleeding Heart Libertarianism (2014). He acknowledges that this sounds un-libertarian, since it implies that corporations can coerce their employees, but he locates the analysis in standard libertarian writers going back to Lysander Spooner and up to the twentieth century in Friedrich Hayek.
The check on such private coercion, in Zwolinski’s account, is market competition: in the long run and in usual circumstances, corporations cannot exert too much power over their employees or customers because another company will sweep in and offer a better deal. Zadek adds the qualification that this holds at least in the long run, though firms might do it in the short run. Zwolinski identifies cracks where competition fails to discipline firms — a downturn in the economy, or a firm acquiring temporary monopoly power, usually because government has given it to them but sometimes on their own. In those cases, he says, libertarians need to worry about coercive power wielded by private firms, not just by the government.
Coercion and sex work
The most extended treatment of coercion comes in the discussion with Maggie McNeill, a former sex worker and blogger. Zadek describes prostitution as a transaction between two adults with no coercion, both getting a benefit and both better off, yet criminal in the big picture because somebody who was not a party to the transaction — a legislator — felt they should not have done it America, The Most Sexually Hypocritical Nation on Earth (2014). He asks how intrusive and offensive it can get for someone unaffected by the transaction to make what others do voluntarily into a crime.
McNeill argues that opponents of prostitution deliberately reframed the transaction as coercive. She says that internal documents of one of the big abolitionist organizations state that if the transaction is framed as coercive, as sex trafficking, and if people talk about coercion and pimps, the public will be more amenable to laws than if it is represented as prostitution. She characterizes the resulting sex trafficking moral panic as the product of a conscious and cynical redefinition of adult consensual prostitution into something coercive, and notes the derail whereby any discussion of consensual prostitution is met with questions about the coerced ones and the children.
Zadek presses the conceptual point directly: he asks what there is about prostitution that is more subject to coercion than any other activity, and who exactly is the coercer. He offers the example of being paid to practice law, saying that if being tempted by payment counts as coercion then he is a coerced lawyer. He contrasts the image of teenage girls dragged from third-world Asian-Pacific countries in shackles with the existence of garment worker sweatshops employing underage illegal immigrants, arguing that we do not criminalize apparel factories but instead criminalize the specific bad behavior rather than the profession itself America, The Most Sexually Hypocritical Nation on Earth (2014).
McNeill extends the comparison to farming, clothes, iPads and iPhones, and domestic service, noting that live-in maid situations can be extremely coercive yet nobody calls for banning maids. Her formulation is that when sex is involved people insist on creating moral narratives that do not exist, and that a woman who would not take money for sex herself should not stand in the way of one who would — nor send armed men to drag her from her workplace and throw her in a cage supposedly for her own good. She describes so-called rescue raids in which women escape from rescue centers, including two in India who drowned trying to cross a river to get away from such a center.
Coercion in the law of sex trafficking
Elizabeth Nolan Brown, an associate editor at Reason, addresses how coercion functions in the legal definition of sex trafficking. She explains that under federal law, in place since the year 2000, any prostitution or commercial sex involving force or fraud or coercion is illegal, and any paid sex involving minors is illegal as well, with no force, fraud or coercion required for a juvenile Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the War on Sex Workers (2019). She notes that people assume trafficking requires abduction or movement from place to place, but that none of that is required for the law.
Brown says that under the guise of a war on sex trafficking what one almost exclusively sees is the government going after sex work — adults who are consenting — and going after everyone’s civil liberties, with power grabs at the federal and state levels justified by the need to stop sex trafficking but never demonstrated to help. Zadek frames the concept itself as conflating two very different topics for political and law enforcement convenience, in the way that illegal immigration conflates the illegal and the immigrant, and argues that law enforcement and the legislature invented the concept to get political cover for using police power to interfere with an otherwise lawful activity Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the War on Sex Workers (2019).
Coercion and speech
A different application appears in the discussion of a California union measure. The guest says that laws prohibiting public employers from employing threats or coercion against employees who might want to join a union have been on the books for many years and that everybody accepts them California’s New Union Gag Order Violates 1st Amendment (2020). His argument is that the union is no longer afraid of actual threats and coercion but of speech — of honest debate and of facts being reported that might put the union in a bad light — and that the measure therefore goes beyond ending threats or coercive behavior to end speech critical of the union.
The guest argues that a public official in a school district facing union demands is obliged to tell constituents what is at stake and to point out the costs of those demands on students, yet doing so could trigger an unfair labor practice, shutting down one side of a debate that requires the public to be informed. He invokes the principle that the First Amendment does not permit the government to play favorites among viewpoints and that government must be neutral, concluding that the law violates viewpoint neutrality California’s New Union Gag Order Violates 1st Amendment (2020).
Across episodes
The topic is touched in four episodes spanning 2014 to 2020. The 2014 episodes establish the concept — Zadek and Zwolinski on state and private coercion, Zadek and Park on force and free markets, and Zadek and McNeill on coercion as a rhetorical weapon against consensual prostitution — while the later episodes apply it to the legal definition of sex trafficking and to compelled speech in labor relations. The excerpts show no development or revision of the underlying concept between the earlier and later treatment; the later guests extend the same framework to new domains rather than disputing it.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not supply a general definition of coercion beyond the paradigmatic case of force or the threat of force, nor do they resolve Zwolinski’s hesitation about whether government is the only institution authorized to use force. The legal materials are described only in broad terms: the excerpts do not name the federal statute, the California measure, or any case, and they do not report what any court held. The discussion of rescue raids and of the two deaths in India is given without names, dates or locations beyond the country.