Coercion is the tool of the desperate.

Coercion is evil precisely because it thus eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another. Free action, in which a person pursues his own aims by the means indicated by his own knowledge, must be based on data which cannot be shaped at will by another.

Coercion cannot but result in chaos in the end.

The man who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman.

The failure of the voluntary methods—whether in the form of codes of ethics or appeals to business ‘cooperation’—to effectively restrain such competitive conditions as price reduction, aggressive sales promotions, and challenges to a competitor's existing markets and clientele caused business leaders to turn to political methods to accomplish their objectives. Recalling Mancur Olson's analysis, where large groups are involved, ‘coercion’ or some other ‘special device’ is necessary to cause individuals to conform their behavior to what is in the interests of the group. It was recognized that the lack of effective means for enforcing restrictive agreements in the marketplace could be overcome by having trade practice standards enforced by political agencies that possessed the requisite coercive machinery.

An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion soon degenerates. For force always attract men of low morality.

Wherever in a home there is immaturity, lack of self-control, and anti-social stimuli, coercion may be necessary in order to safeguard the other members of the family, and to prevent remorse for irreparable wrongdoing. To say that restraint administered in love and with the welfare of all concerned vividly in mind is immoral, is to reduce society to anarchy and chaos.

This Coercion Act professes to be in the main an Act directed against conspiracy, and conspiracy is a bad thing. But under the name of conspiracy we say that it is directed against combination. Combination is not always a very good thing, but combination is very often the sole means by which the weak can protect themselves against the strong, the poor against the wealthy.

With this Bill my right hon. Friends continue their pursuit of one of the hoariest futilities in the recorded history of politics, the attempt to use coercion in some form or other to prevent the laws of supply and demand from expressing themselves in terms of prices.

Libertarians fail to realize that the price system is, and ought to be, a method of coercion. Nature is not so bountiful as to give each of us all the goods he desires. We have, by the nature of things, to be coerced out of such an expectation. That is why we have policemen and courts. That is why we charge prices which are high enough relative to limited money, to limit consumption.

The coercion which has been introduced has not been a coercion against crime...It has been a coercion against combination. And combination—it stands and glares upon us from every page in the history of Ireland—is the only arm by which a poor and destitute and feeble population are able to make good their ground, even in the slightest degree, against the domineering power of the State and of the wealthy with England at their back.

An example of indirect coercion: There is no law that says we have to go to work every day and follow our employer’s orders. Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone else’s employee.

That’s what politics is all about—coercion and lies.

Legal coercion is a course which the law allows.