I happen to believe that it is also coercive to choose people at random and make some of them “rich” and others “poor”. “Poor” people are those who will die unless some “rich” person gives them permission to live. The mechanism by which this permission is granted is money. If you haven’t faced starvation then, OK, you are not one of the global “poor”. You’re lucky. Just because you haven’t had a house and a cash sum from an elderly aunt doesn’t mean you haven’t inherited anything.

The accident of your birth has given you an eduction (unless you borrowed money, starting aged 5, to pay all your own school fees. That’s legally impossible in most countries, since 5-year-olds generally cannot assume debt), and opportunities, and a particular level at which your society will support you if you can’t find a job with at least particular minimal pay and conditions. Others have a worse education, fewer opportunities, and lower standards of support and of minimal conditions. The choice of someone whose minimal conditions are much worse than our own, is not comparable to our choice.

So the “tryant” could just as easily be some guy running a factory, who knows that if he fires his workers they’ll be hungry that night and dead before they have time to walk back to the farm they came from. He might have lied to or misled them when he first employed them, or stolen from them once they got there, all that matters to him is that now they’re at slightly more risk of death if they leave than if they stay. The society might just be poor and unable to afford better standards of law or policing (in which case we can argue whether society is improved by us buying stuff from that factory, coercive as it is); or it might be corrupt or dictatorial; or it might have been threatened into its employment policies by Western governments keen to acquire labour at cheaper than the previous going rate. Western companies do deals with such factories on a continual basis, and I cannot see that by doing so, they always and only increase the choices available to those employees.

A support for free trade on the principle of personal freedom for all must say, “only if certain employment conditions are met”. The fact that people can be tricked or coerced into doing something does not mean they’re better off than they would be had that not happened, so “certain conditions” requires defining what we mean by deceit, and coercion. There may come a point where I genuinely think that something constitutes coercion, and a hard-core free-trader genuinely thinks it isn’t. But I think the current state of the world is far from that point, and that things are going on, which we encourage, and which the hard-core free traders would think were pretty coercive if they were happening to their mothers.

I doubt you have either, unless you’ve been a member of your county’s military or its diplomatic corps (whatever country that is). Most likely not even then.

However, it’s quite clear that others have done these things in the past, and continue to do several of them in the present. I think such actions can reasonably be said to have disturbed the “natural state” of the countries in which they took place. I, personally, have inherited a society which was created by those actions. So have the inhabitants of most African nations, China, India, Chile, Iran, Congo, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Pakistan and others. It will be quite some time before there are no longer specific and identifiable effects on living individuals.

My claim is not that this totally de-legitimises trade, but that Western societies, bristling with weaponry, force other nations at gunpoint to do as we say. It is then laughable hypocrisy to pat ourselves on the backs for “giving them options” as we watch them go where they’re pushed. I doubt that we’re any worse thieves and thugs than the privileged classes who have gone before us throughout history. Quite probably less bad. But an economic theory which refuses to consider this extent is a self-serving lie.

The poor need more freedom, of course, if they are to be less poor. The idea that it is freedom merely to compete in a game in which we’re born ahead, and will kill to protect our lead, is pablum, designed to help economists and generals sleep at night.

There are a great many ways in which western countries restrict the freedom of action of people in less wealthy nations, and worrying about sweatshops and other forms of forced labour is not principle among them. I imagine that almost everyone reading this blog is sat comfortably in an armchair. But if one is to serve freedom at all, even in a small way from a position of privilege, then it must be by opposing tyrants, not by loudly defending the right to send guns to tyrants in return for T-shirts.

I don’t understand how it is that ‘we’ have created the poor conditions elsewhere in the world. Were these people always wealthy until we came along and took something from them? The natural state of mankind is poverty- isn’t it possible that no one has ‘coerced’ these people into poverty, but rather that they have not yet left the natural state?

I’ve considered becoming a lobster fisherman, even knowing the risks, because the wages are a lot better than the low wage safe jobs I’ve been able to acquire so far in life.

Nobody is holding a gun to my head. I’m fairly intelligent. I know these jobs hold a risk of death or injury or lung cancer. Nothing is without risk, it’s just a choice of how much risk you want versus the potential advantages.

I’m still undecided on how much risk I want, but I certainly don’t want anyone removing my options “for my own good” unless they are prepared to compensate my potential losses, and I only accept payment in dollar format. :D

People with guns held to their heads, or who face starvation because they have inherited no capital, will “choose” to do a lot of things if they’re ordered to do them.

People with guns to their heads will indeed follow orders (most of the time). As for people who have inherited no capital: I have inherited very little capital so far, but even before inheriting that, I never felt that I had to follow orders: I also had the option of changing job.

It is true that, in centrally-planned societies, people might starve if they do not take the job that they are offered. It is also true that, in a racist or caste-based society, some groups might have only one job on offer. It is also true that, in a village or small town with a single employer, people have to either take the job on offer or leave town; but people are prevented from leaving town only in a feudal society.

In conclusion, your argument would seem to apply only to our trade with centrally-planned, caste-based, or feudal societies. (I am making sweeping generalizations, of course; but then, so did you.) Maybe this is the point that you wanted to make all along: in this case, I am sorry for missing it.

Obviously (to me) the proper response is to remove the threat of death. But even given it’s there, I don’t think we should accept the proceeds of the labour that a person “prefers” to perform when he has a gun to his head and is ordered to work. I think it’s correct to say that citizens in a poor country who refuse to work due to unacceptable conditions, quite often would be in worse trouble than they would be in should there be no work available and charity or the social security system (such as it is) were to take over. As such, offering low-quality jobs may or may not improve the options available to those workers. We can’t make a full generalisation.

But then, I believe that it is illegitimate in the first place for comfortable capitalists (in the West or elsewhere) to maintain a class which has no capital and no right to a minimum standard of living, and therefore is coerced into labour under threat of death. Whether we maintain and exploit this class at home or abroad is morally irrelevant. Others would perhaps counter-claim that it is right that if your parents are rich, and choose to make you rich, then that power should be inherited; and that it it right that through accident of birth some people are protected from certain kinds of coercion under threat of death, while others face it their entire lives.

There is of course a moral distinction between holding a gun to someone’s head and ordering them to perform some service, as against bricking them up in a desert and offering them water if they perform a particular service before they die of thirst. But it’s a pretty meagre distinction, especially for those born in the desert.

It may be callous for us to turn down the results of sweatshop labour, risking actual harm to those workers. As against that, having actively cultivated this class and asserted that our right to property trumps their right to life, it is quite monstrous to lock them in factories, work them to the bone, subject them to sexual harassment, and whatever other working conditions we consider criminal when they happen in our home countries, and claim that not doing so would deny them opportunities.

As I say, the right action would be to constitute a society which is less coercive in the first place. Our power to do so is of course very limited, but still anything short of that can be made to look callous, because it is. All sides can accuse the others of causing great harm, because that is exactly what is happening, and continues to happen wherever people interact where one has vastly superior legal rights to the other.

All that said, I’m *still* not against free trade. The distribution of property and power is the problem, not trade. Trade will make those poorer countries richer, and eventually they will provide their citizens with more rights and better standards of living. Trade allows us to distinguish between better and worse employers abroad, and to exclude those we believe to be using the threat of death illegitimately. We just shouldn’t pretend, while there are still people who will die if they can’t negotiate working conditions, that any of this is noble or that what we do is other than coercive.