@cshentrup @AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname @magitweeter Suppose, my good friend, that a group of bandits comes to a village, sacks it, steals all the land, and then leases it back to them, on bare subsistence terms, so that after rents they just barely have calories to live. Then, they open a factory that offers a somewhat above subsistence wage, purely voluntary. 1/

@cshentrup @AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname @magitweeter One way to think of that is that the bad thing was the initial theft, but given that as a fait accompli, the new option is not coercive, in fact should be applauded as offering a real improvement in circumstances! 2/

@cshentrup @AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname @magitweeter But suppose the initial theft and the (relatively) generous offer might not be independent. Suppose that the bandits chose to steal the land in order to change the villagers option set so that the wage they wanted to offer would be a real plum, where when they owned the land their reservation wage would be high. 3/

@cshentrup @AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname @magitweeter Again, on its own the new offer can hardly be condemned! But to the degree the baseline circumstances that help render the offer attractive are themselves shaped by the offerers, do you think the sequence might compose to something coercive? /fin