In the comments section on my earlier post “It’s Not Just About Markets” (the “it”, by the way, refers to libertarianism) Dan Kervick wrote “…since voluntary exchange is a routine aspect of life in almost every modern society, then if that’s all libertarianism boils down to, it doesn’t say much.” I was initially going to respond by drawing on concepts such as “autonomy,” “liberty”, and the value of the individual. But then when thinking about the examples I was using, it struck me forcibly that rather than being routine, truly voluntary exchanges are actually incredibly (both in the colloquial sense of “very”, and the sense of “it’s amazing that this is so!”) rare in modern societies.

Let’s define “voluntary exchange” as “an exchange untouched by coercion”. (This might or—as I suspect—might not be a defensible definition, but it’ll suffice for the purpose of this post.) If this is how we are to understand voluntary exchange, then true voluntary exchange is vanishingly rare, since coercive interference in human action is surprisingly widespread. To see this, consider a simple example: My act last week of buying my wife some daffodils. On the face of it, this might seem to be a paradigm example of voluntary exchange—I desire the flowers, I pick them out, I hand over the money for the asking price to the cashier at the supermarket who takes it willingly.

But on reflection, this simple exchange is shot through with coercion. Most obviously, the price of the flowers reflected coercively-imposed taxes. Not just sales tax, but taxes imposed on the airlines and trucks that brought them to New Jersey, the property taxes that the supermarket pays, and the taxes (if any) associated with its being an employer.

Moving beyond the influence of taxes on the price of these flowers—although we’ve not even begun to scratch the surface here, having yet to mention taxes on the fuel used by the supermarket which in turn is reflected in the price of its products, taxes on the fuel used to transport the flowers, and so on—their price is also affected by the wages paid to the cashier, and other supermarket employees… Wages which are at the level they are, in part, because of restrictions on immigration into the United States. And, of course, the price that I was willing and able to pay for them was also affected by my own wage-level, which is also influenced by these same restrictions. (Note, by the way, that I’m not saying that were restrictions on immigration lifted these wages would be lower—I don’t think we have any a priori way of knowing this, and removing such restrictions might make them higher, either directly or through increasing their purchasing power.) And their price was also affected by other, more direct, forms of trade restrictions. Maybe not on the flowers themselves, but the cost of the supermarket’s steel-framed building was no doubt affected by protectionism, as were the costs of the vehicles used to transport them—and so on.

And I could continue in a similar vein, if not ad infinitum, then certainly ad nauseum—and not just about the coercive background to my buying my wife some flowers, but the coercive background to so many apparently voluntary exchanges in modern societies.

So, rather than saying “not much”, it seems that even with just a focus on voluntary exchange libertarianism has a lot to say. And not just about buying daffodils.