SS: *If the government mandates a 50 cent higher minimum wage, and everyone makes it, there is no incentive whatsoever to be more productive. It’s far, far more likely that productivity will go down, because the cost of labor goes up without a corresponding increase in per-worker output. *
But how does your theoretical “likely” measure up against the real-life consequences of actual MW increases? Seems to me that over the past few decades we (I mean we in the US, I don’t know the deal for you guys in Canada) have continued to have increasing productivity even when the government has raised the MW, and that the stats quoted in other posters’ links here bear that out.
But some of the forms of “coercion” that can happen to a person living a country with a safety net as tattered as the U.S.'s are not just “unpleasant” but catastrophic. People can lose their homes and have to live out of their cars. People can lose thier ability to take care of their children and have to give them up to family or adoption. People can lose their health insurance and find themselves unable to afford vital medications.
These siturations are not ALWAYS what happens as a result of unemployment, but they DO happen. Such a situation is not merely “unpleasant” it is absolutely horrific. Just because no one is pointing a gun at your head, it doesn’t mean your situation isn’t desperate. And that may not consist of “coercion” in your narrow sense, but it’s close enough for any reasonable person.
John Mace: *But you are simply making up your own definition of coercion. *
But so are the libertarians who arbitrarily restrict what they consider illegitimate “coercion” to rather narrow applications of the concepts “force” and “fraud”. If you look at the dictionary definition of “coerce” that you yourself linked to, you can see that it includes much broader meanings of the term:
There is plenty of room to dispute what the most descriptive and useful definition of “coercion” truly would be, but the libertarians cannot assume that their particular definition of the term is intrinsically the “right” one, any more than RTF does. I tend to agree that his use of the term (applied to impersonal “circumstances” as well as actual agents, as long as the circumstances are bad enough) is unhelpfully broad, but I also think that the standard libertarian definition is unhelpfully narrow.