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You argue that because the water seller did not create the hurricane, they cannot be a coercer. This is a clever but ultimately hollow distinction.
You are correct: the mugger creates a threat, while the water seller finds one. But you are making a profound moral error by assuming that only the creator of a threat can act coercively.
Coercion involves a deliberate threat. You can’t be guilty of coercion just for merely existing during a crisis. There’s a big difference between taking advantage of a situation and creating one through force and violence, but you can't seem to make the distinction.
The core of coercion is not the origin of the duress, but the leveraging of that duress to compel an action.
- The mugger leverages a threat he created.
- The predatory seller leverages a threat that nature created.
Leveraging scarcity isn’t coercion, it's how markets allocate goods. If you really believe that using scarcity to influence decisions is coercion, then every economic transaction under scarcity becomes coercive. That includes doctors charging for medicine, grocery stores charging for food, or anyone pricing anything during a shortage.
From the victim's standpoint, the result is identical: they are forced to surrender their property under a threat of grievous harm or death. The choice to hand over your wallet to an armed man is no more "voluntary" than the choice to hand over your life savings to the monopolist who controls the only water that can save your child. A choice is not free when the alternative is misery or suffering.
Again, a person who says “give me your wallet or I’ll shoot you” is threatening harm. A seller who says “this is the price I need to part with my water” is not threatening anything. The difference is not “convenient”, it’s fundamental to any coherent theory of ethics.
Your final escalation to comparing my logic to "murderous communist regimes" is a telling sign of a weak argument; when reason fails, resort to slurs.
No, because that’s exactly how murderous communist regimes justified their policies. They outlawed private trade and property rights under the banner of “ending coercion.” The result wasn’t justice, it was starvation. Plenty of leftists here in this forum push the same logic: they claim capitalists coerce workers simply by offering jobs, as if “work or starve” is the same as “your money or your life.”