Opiate of the Red States

A few weeks back, the conservative organization Young Americans for Freedom denounced Congressman Ron Paul and expelled him from their National Advisory Board, on which he had served for twenty years. This, despite the fact that Paul was the recipient of the group's greatest honor, the Guardian of Freedom award, and despite the fact that Paul is by far the most thoroughgoing opponent of big government and supporter of free enterprise in Congress country and has done an enormous amount to popularize those ideas- ideas that are ostensibly among the YAF's core principles. (Young American's for Freedom should not be confused with the Young Americans for Liberty, another student-based group. You can tell them apart by the fact that YAL's leaders don't don't snicker when they say the last word of their group's name.)

This, in microcosm, is an excellent reenactment of the story of the American conservative movement since the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001.

The reason for his expulsion action was simple- Paul is anti-war. He thinks that “limited government” is incompatible with spending hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars on the military every year to perpetually garrison the entire planet and billions more for armed social engineering projects on the other side of the world. He's argued that foreigners become upset when their friends, relatives, countrymen, or coreligionists are maimed or killed, and that this displeasure has more to do with why some of them are willing to hurl themselves to certain death for a chance to kill Americans than hatred of push-up bras or BLTs or the works of Montesquieu does.  His preferred response to terrorism does not involve unending “nation-building” military occupations or the unprovoked flattening of whatever foreign country he happens to be annoyed with at the time.

Let's take a look at YAF's core statement of principles, the Sharon Statement. The Sharon Statement endorses strict constitutionalism and federalism limiting the federal government to its constitutionally enumerated powers, the free  market, the view that the proper role of government is to preserve individual freedom through law enforcement and national defense, that national sovereignty must not be ceded to foreign or international bodies, and that the standard by which a foreign policy should be judged is “the just interests of the United States.”

Not bad. If anyone within spitting distance of importance in mainstream American right-of-center politics had actually demonstrated principles like these within my lifetime, I'd hold modern conservatism in much higher esteem. Remove the now-outdated references to international communism (the statement was written in 1960) and it sounds like something Ron Paul could easily have written himself- and, unlike most Republican who hold public office or enjoy any media prominence, actually believe. Even if you accept the claim that Paul's non-interventionism does not “serve the just interests of the United States,”  Ron Paul is still by far the national political figure who best exemplifies the ideals of what is supposed to be YAF's creed.

And yet Paul is still utterly beyond the pale in the eyes of YAF's leadership ; not merely unfit for participation in their organization, but a moral monster. The YAF's leadership didn't merely say that they thought Paul was too far out of step with the YAF's ideals for them to continue working with him. In the statement issued about Paul's expulsion, YAF Senior National Director Jordan Marks said that Paul's actions “border on treason.” (Emphasis added.)

YAF is just one group, and there's clearly a strong element of opportunism here. The official statement against Paul- who has long been quite vocal about his foreign policy views- says they're only taking action against him now because he's started leading "left-wing subversives" into the movement. If we give Mr. Marks the benefit of the doubt and assume that he would not publicly state that someone is on the border of being guilty of something that is punishable by death under the laws of the United States and has traditionally been considered to be among the most despicable of all crimes unless he actually meant it, it would follow that YAF has been willingly associating itself with a known borderline-traitor for years. Apparently, YAF's leadership cannot abide an influx of young anti-interventionists inspired by Paul's example, but is "big tent" enough to accept years of behavior that borders on “levying war” against the United States and/or “adhering to their Enemies.” That seems sort of odd for a group that expresses so much concern about defending America, though perhaps the various left-wing anti-Americans I was exposed to in my formative years have clouded my judgment.

Nevertheless, its example is depressingly illustrative; either Marks et al. sincerely believe what the say about Paul, or they're playing to an audience that they expect to be well-disposed towards what they said. In either case, once YAF's leaders decided to abandon their convenient hypocrisy (or emerged from cryogenic hibernation, or whatever was stopping them from driving History's Greatest Monster from their ranks before now), their condemnation and excommunication of Paul had a well-established template to follow.

Support for militarism and foreign adventurism is not merely the dominant or most strongly held position in post 9/11 mainstream conservatism, but its defining principle as a political movement. This level of condemnation comes in different degrees but the fundamental principle is pretty consistent: being conspicuously antiwar is qualitatively worse than deviating from other principles conservatives claim to hold dear. Almost unlimited disdain for supposed conservative principles like free markets, limited government, constitutionalism, and federalism is excusable as long as you're pro-war enough, and no amount of support for them matters if you aren't.

(Mainstream liberalism follows a similar principle in regards to abridging civil liberties, giving giant piles of government money to the rich and privileged, compelling members of the middle and working classes to give piles of their own money and/or their homes to same, blasting hapless foreigners to pulp in ill-conceived military ventures, powerful white guys doing horrendous things to vulnerable females, and the like.)

It's possible to be pro-war and yet so unacceptably deviant in others ways that you're consigned to the outer darkness with folks like Paul, but it's damned hard. Being a vehemently anti-religious Marxist isn't enough. Instituting a state-level prototype of Obamacare while serving as a governor isn't enough. Being a Democratic Party candidate for the vice-presidency with F ratings from the National Taxpayers Union and the National Rifle Association isn't enough. This phenomenon isn't new, of course, since mainstream Cold War conservatism spurned vocal antimilitarists like Murray Rothbard and John T. Flynn but was glad to embrace New Dealers and social democrats who were sufficiently interventionist, but it's more rigid and far more hysterical.

Now, this is not universal, though the intense hostility many conservatives display towards conservative dissenters (such as paleoconservatives) on this issue only serves to emphasize the general rule. The popularity of Ron Paul in the last few years further shows that there are people who identify as conservative who don't share these priorities, and my hope is that things like the Tea Party movement will spur some conservatives to take a more serious interest in the idea of limiting government power that won't fade into oblivion once the Democrats are out of the White House. The resurgence of antistatist-sounding rhetoric among so many politicians and other prominent figures on the Right is to a great extent a pose, to be sure, but part of the reason the pose is so useful is because it brings in people who actually do take ideas like that seriously, at least some of the time, but have enough blind spots or gaps in their understanding and awareness to be taken in by Republican lip service to them.

(The other principal reason the pose is useful is that there is a significant- probably more significant- strain within modern conservatism that places great value and emphasis on the word "freedom", but has little or no regard for the freedom of individuals in even a limited or confused sense. It's not that they're lying- except to themselves, I suppose- it's just that they have a conception of freedom devoid of actual content. “Freedom” in this context simply means what America is and does, regardless of what America is and does; You could swap in “goodness” or “American” or “fahrvergnugen“ with little or no loss of meaning. They're the exemplars of the “shut up and enjoy your freedom of speech” philosophy.)

A political movement mimicking the rhetoric of ideals its biggest players and many of the rank-and-file don't actually respect very much- either as a deliberate deception or due to self-delusion-  is playing a dangerous game. The people who aren't in on the joke may eventually notice the disparity between your words and deeds, or realize that what you claim to believe has implications- perhaps radical implications- you haven't acknowledged. That's why the all-consuming primacy of the “War on Terror,”or some other foreign menace, is so helpful: it eternally excuses conservatism's failure to be what it claims to be.

It allows you to assert hostility  to “big government” as a general principle while supporting so many deviations from it- because the war on terrorism is so important, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, etc.- that the exceptions devour the supposed rule. It means that someone like Ron Paul should be rejected in favor of people who make professed Republican hostility to domestic big government, collectivism, welfare statism, and meddling Washington bureaucrats and political elites seem like an obscene joke, because the War on Terror is so important that all other principles are secondary. But hang in there, and someday we'll have the luxury of making an effort to act on the ideals we're always talking about. Just not today, or the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that.

American conservatism is remarkably similar to communism in this respect, now that I think about it.

David Horowitz. 'Nuff said.

David Horowitz had a recent post at NewsRealBlog, "Ron Paul Is A Vicious Anti-Semite and Anti-American and Conservatives Need To Wash Their Hands of Him." In it, Horowitz argues that Ron Paul is... well, a vicious anti-Semite, and supports this by saying that:

Now Paul is making a priority of withdrawing aid for Israel  — the only democracy in the Middle East and the only reliable ally of the United States.

He then approvingly posts a message sent out by Gary Bauer on the subject, which includes the following in it's criticism of Paul:

Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) has just introduced an amendment to end all U.S. aid to Israel ... The U.S. gives billions of dollars a year to foreign countries that hate us and regularly vote against us at the United Nations.  But, Israel votes with the U.S. 97% of the time.  They are a loyal ally that shares our values.  The aid they receive is used to buy military equipment from U.S. companies so the money comes back to us. Ron Paul’s proposal makes no sense.

This demonstrates one of the cardinal rules of deception: Keep explicit falsehoods to a minimum. Whatever your subject, say things about that subject that are true- but only some things that are true, isolated from their actual context and arranged in a pattern that points towards the desired conclusion.

Did Ron Paul propose ending U.S. aid to Israel? He did. More precisely, he proposed ending all foreign aid, and since Israel is not a state, territory, possession, dependency, or federally administered district of the United States of America it falls under the "foreign" category.

So yes, it's true that Ron Paul supports "withdrawing aid for Israel," just as it's true that I try to avoid large, raucous parties and gatherings where Jews are present, would feel extremely uncomfortable if I discovered that a Jewish voyeur had installed tiny hidden cameras in my bathroom, and refuse to wear miniskirts or ballroom gowns or "World's Greatest Grandma" T-shirts that have been worn by Jews. Some fanatical Markley apologists would no doubt make excuses for this blatant anti-Semitism by attributing these things to the fact that John Markley is not particularly social or outgoing, or values his privacy and personal space, or isn't a woman, but Horowitz has sniffed me out.

Breathing is also a privilege, not a right

Whenever the subject of the health insurance mandate comes up, one of the most common- perhaps the most common-  rejoinders directed at people who oppose forcing everyone in the country to give money to the insurance companies whether they want their product or not is to cite the precedent of mandatory automobile liability insurance.

Now, like virtually all statist arguments that take the form of, "If it's OK for the government to do X, it's OK for it to do Y," the desirability of X is simply assumed without argument. (New Hampshire has no mandatory insurance laws for drivers, and has somehow avoided becoming an apocalyptic Mad Max-esque hellhole.) Leave that aside for the now. There are a number of important dissimilarities between the two types of insurances and the mandate laws concerning them that make the analogy dubious, but put that aside for the moment as well.

Suppose they are analogous, such that if mandatory automobile insurance for drivers is unobjectionable then insurance mandate is likewise unobjectionable. For that to be the case, the argument that justifies one must also work as a justification for the other. What is the argument for mandatory automobile insurance?

The stated purpose of mandatory insurance is to prevent people from potentially imposing costs on others by incurring debts to others- lawsuit damages from a collision, in this case-  that they cannot pay. The reason it's generally considered unobjectionable to fulfill this objective by requiring drivers to buy insurance is that operating a vehicle on a government-owned road is, we are told at great length, a privilege and not a right. Therefore, the reasoning goes, it is reasonable for the government to impose conditions that a citizen must fulfill or "agree" to before he or she may exercise that privilege.

This can include things that would be considered unreasonable, unconstitutional, or outright tyrannical if applied to legally recognized rights. No one seriously advocates requiring insurance for possible defamation suits or unpaid child support for anyone who speaks in public or has sex, or making people apply for a government permit and pass a test before choosing what religion to practice, for instance, whereas landatory automobile insurance for drivers inspires little criticism or controversy.

This allows various moral and constitutional inconveniences to go by the wayside when mere privileges are involved. It's why constitutional rights concerning search and seizure and self-incrimination are a dead letter if the police decide, as they have the legal power to do in some states, to hold you down and forcibly stick you with a needle to draw your blood for a blood alcohol level test- you gave your "implied consent" in return for the privilege of driving. It's why, as we've been shown recently, you can be required to submit to having your genitals groped by government agents before boarding an airplane. It's why the federal Terrorist Screening Center can forbid you from traveling by air with the stroke of a pen, legal niceties about due process and bills of attainder notwithstanding.

A privilege, by its nature, is not something you are owed by others, or have a right to demand, or are entitled to possess and keep . It is something someone else has the right to grant or withhold at their pleasure. Privileges are something you must prove yourself worthy of, by the standards of whoever has the power to grant them. They exist so long as they are compatible with the interests and desires of the one dispensing them, and no longer.

So goes the standard justification for mandatory automobile insurance, our supposed precedent for mandatory health insurance. The commonality between the two pointed out by people drawing an analogy between them is that a person without health insurance can also impose a financial burden on others. This aspect of the analogy has its weaknesses. Leaving that aside, however, that's only part of the argument for mandatory driving insurance, and not the most important part. If the precedent of mandatory driving insurance justifies mandatory health insurance, then the activities for which people are required to buy health insurance must likewise be a privilege rather than a right. Otherwise, the analogy falls apart and the argument with it.

You fall under the scope of state automobile insurance mandates by driving an automobile on government roads. You fall under the scope of federal health insurance mandate by being alive. You don't have to actually do anything, beyond metabolizing enough oxygen in your nervous system to not be declared legally dead. The auto insurance mandate is only a relevant precedent for the health insurance mandate if being allowed to live at all is not a right, but a privilege that the government can impose conditions on, revoke, or make conditional on whatever factors those in power deem relevant to their goals for public policy.

I certainly don't think the average person using the auto insurance analogy intends that implication. On the contrary, he'd probably recoil from it if he understood it. Nevertheless, it says something when so many people so readily take something that is the quintessential example of an activity that is not regarded as a right, only a privilege that the government can grant, revoke, or set almost unlimited conditions on, and blithely treat it as analogous to being able to live at all. Though I suppose "being allowed to live at all" would be more accurate.

Carrion birds

You know, say what you will about hysteria-mongering right-wing 1980s clergymen who went around claiming that America was under siege by a vast cabal of murderous Devil-worshiping occultists and tried to blame youth murders or suicides on heavy metal or Dungeons and Dragons, they had this going for them: They usually focused on kids who had actually listened to rock music or played role-playing games. It's a pity that so many American left-of-center commentators, journalists, politicians, and Nobel laureates just can't match the demanding standards of thoughtfulness, rationality, and epistemic rigor that fundamentalists at mass public burnings of fantasy books and Judas Priest records hold themselves to.

Looking back in the aftermath of Jared Loughner's shooting spree, it's impressive just how quickly, eagerly, and ferociously the idea that the attack was the fault of antigovernment political rhetoric was embraced on the basis of nothing whatsoever, aside from liberal desire for some corpses to club critics over the head with, and how tenaciously so many clung to that belief. There was a barely-concealed note of triumph in much of the reaction to the murders of Stephen Johns and George Tiller at the respective hands of a white supremacist and a militant antiabortionist, but the response from liberals in the media- and countless others all over the internet- to the near-fatal shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was little short of orgasmic.

(It's also a rather graphic demonstration of where the average citizen stands in the great chain of being, with Giffords' wounding drawing more horror, outrage, and sympathy than the other twelve people who were wounded and the six people who died, one of them a nine-year old girl, put together. The line dividing the person whose life and well-being actually matters to the media and the political class from everyone else was so stark and undisguised as to seem almost feudal.)

The narrative was established literally before the bodies were cold, and since then we've seen an eruption of condemnations of President Obama's critics for their supposed role in causing the shooting. Some, such as Paul Krugman, are quite explicit in laying blame at the feet of conservatives or libertarians; others contain enough weasel words for the speaker/writer to say effectively the same thing without explicitly committing themselves, or are clearly intended to encourage the belief that critics of liberals are to blame but have some sort of "just asking questions/I'm not saying I know for sure that Obama isn't really a citizen, but..." hedge. The latter sort has grown more common as actual information about the shooter streamed in and the assumption that Loughner was motivated by right wing rhetoric went from being merely baseless to outright falsified.

This assumption was not shaken by the first actual information revealed about Loughner, such as the fact that he had a list of favorite books that included both the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. (The Communist Manifesto is the book that had its Amazon.com sales rank shoot up after Glenn Beck endorsed it, right?). Nor was it shaken by Loughner's own words from Internet postings and YouTube videos- repetitive, nonsensical rants filled with the hallmarks of schizophrenic thought disorder but devoid of any endorsement of right-wing or libertarian politics. The closest anything ever came to actual supporting evidence for the conclusion the media instantly pounced on was the discovery that he supposedly had an interest in the gold standard- which turned out to be part of another set of nonsensical ramblings with no relationship to the ideas of actual gold standard supporters.

(There's also the question of how "antigovernment" many of the designated villains in this farce actually are, of course, partly because of opportunistic use of libertarian-sounding rhetoric by conservative statists and partly because many liberals still haven't mastered complex concepts like "Frederic Bastiat and Francisco Franco were not the same guy.")

When the sheer weight of evidence finally forced liberal commentators to back off from their desperately longed-for "murderous right-wing militant" scenario, the result was an orderly strategic withdrawal to a functionally identical fallback position: Perhaps Loughner was not directly motivated by any recognizable political ideology, but his actions were still caused by overly vehement criticism of the Democrats, or government more generally, that pushed him over the edge.

This back-up argument is also based on nothing, and is further discredited by the fact that Loughner's hostile fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords predates the Tea Party movement's existence and apparently started because of her failure to answer one of his nonsensical questions at a public event in mid-2007. But Loughner exists, people saying nasty things about Democrats exist, and no one has direct access to Loughner's thoughts or exhaustive records of every single moment of his life, so you can't prove with absolute certainty that there isn't a causal connection.  It's still no better supported by actual evidence than the idea that Loughner was somehow motivated by leftist propaganda, or the Rev. Fred Phelps' "divine retribution for insufficient homophobia" hypothesis, but it's good enough for politics.

I say "functionally identical" because the lesson everyone is supposed to draw from it is unchanged: The only legitimate, responsible form of "debate" or "dissent" is that which takes the goodness of the state's existing powers and the desirability of further state expansion as given, and anybody who doesn't accept that starting point needs to shut the hell up before their deviance from center-left statism causes another horrible tragedy.

Still more disingenuously, some have taken up a third line of defense: OK, so maybe there's no reason to believe that people who criticize liberal policies more vigorously than liberals would like had anything to do with this, but isn't the ferocity of (the other side's) political rhetoric still a cause for concern and something we should condemn? So, why not discuss that now? This is an especially repellent ploy because it tries to continue to encourage a mental connection between violence and hostile political rhetoric without even trying to argue for any link between them.

Well, perhaps the state of political discourse is worth discussing. We could also use this as an opportunity to talk about the ongoing war in Afghanistan, or gender discrimination in the provision of government services to victims of domestic violence, or occupational licensing laws, or American society's stigmatization of introverts. What relevance do any of these things have to what happened in Tuscon? The same relevance as the harshness of antigovernment political rhetoric: None whatsoever, aside from the fact that I could probably make a more emotionally compelling case discussing them if I had a few bullet-riddled bodies to use as stage props.

Walking out your front door is a privilege, not a right

Among all the other reasons they're appalling, the Transportation Security Administration's new "enhanced pat-downs" and the willingness of many people to defend them are another example of how quickly a scenario that used to seem like an intentionally ridiculous reductio ad absurdum can become reality. If anyone in 2001 had suggested that in less than a decade the expansion of the national security apparatus would've brought us to the point where having one's privates manhandled by government agents would be a common, unexceptional procedure for getting on a plane, it would've been held up as proof of how silly, hysterical, and unreasonable civil libertarians were in their opposition to even the most reasonable, commonsensical, Serious People-approved measures to protect the American people in the post-9/11 world. If something like this appeared in a book or movie or TV show set in some dystopian future America, it would seem like bad writing- too implausible, too hamfisted in the way it pushes at people's sense of revulsion to make the bad guys seem like cartoon caricatures, too obviously a cheap attempt to manipulate the emotions of the audience rather than thoughtful speculation about what the future might hold. (Even the name of the company that makes the machines that scan through people's clothes, "Rapiscan Systems," sounds like something some especially lazy and unsubtle dimestore hack would come up with.)

And yet here we are, with precisely that happening and no shortage of people lining up to defend it. Many valuable lessons can be learned from all this- about the mainstream media's revolting combination of sycophancy towards the government and smug, sneering condescension towards any dissent among the peasantry, the tribalism and authoritarianism of so many liberals/progressives even on the civil liberties issues they're supposedly "good" on, the bigotry and intolerance of many of the same people who pride themselves on how accepting and live-and-let-live they supposedly are. What's most interesting to me, though, is just how implicitly totalitarian some of the more popular justifications are.

(This primarily applies to the honest defenders of the TSA's current methods.  The loathsome "As a liberal I nominally disapprove of degrading attacks on people's privacy and dignity, groping little kids, turning air travel into a potentially nightmarish ordeal for rape survivors, autistics, and anyone else who has issues with being manhandled by strangers, and leaving cancer sufferers humiliated and/or spattered with their own urine, but I disapprove of people who actually speak out against it or challenge it far more" subspecies is a separate case.)

Quite typical are arguments along the lines of, “You consented to this when you bought a ticket. No one is forcing you to fly.” The rather creepy similarity this argument shares with the sort of "You knew you what you were getting yourself into" abuse directed at victims of rape and sexual assault has been ably discussed by others, so I'll stick to the more general libertarian point about the abuse of the concept "consent." These procedures are mandated by the government. They are not the result of property owners freely choosing to set particular conditions to be allowed on their property. If you wish to engage in a consensual commercial exchange with an airline, you are forced to submit to the government's procedures. This is obvious, but when dealing with such elementary mistakes it's necessary to restate the obvious.

Yes, you can choose not to fly. If I assembled a gang of club-wielding hooligans, lined them up by the door of your local supermarket and forced shoppers to run the gauntlet as they entered, you're free to buy food somewhere else, or grow or hunt your own. If I announced that I would kill anyone who tried to go out with my sister, you are free to not date my sister. If you think the TSA rules are supposed to be more legitimate because they're from the government, fine; suppose that the duly elected legislature has decreed that supermarket shoppers must run the gauntlet or that dating my sister is a capital crime. (Yes, the latter is effectively a bill of attainder, but if we're already reducing the 4^th Amendment of the Constitution to a meaningless blot of ink I don't see a minor creative reinterpretation of Article 1 doing much harm.)

This sort of argument based on “consent” is among the most commonly used defenses of state power in general, of course-the state is legitimate and thus has the right to make you do/not do X because you supposedly consented to it by choosing to remain within the territory the state claims jurisdiction over rather than leave. (And the state has the right to claim jurisdiction over the territory and demand obedience within it because the state's power is legitimate. And that power is legitimate because, of course, you've consented to it. It's never a good sign when the justification for your political ideology resembles the episode of Futurama where the cast accidentally travels back in time and Fry discovers, to his horror, that he's his own grandfather.) But hearing this kind of reasoning used to justify and whitewash coercion in the course of an abstract discussion about the government's power to use force in general doesn't have the same visceral punch as seeing it used in a more concrete scenario, especially when that scenario is “If you enter a voluntary commercial transaction with a private business, you have no grounds to object when some third party gropes your genitals against your will.”

Similarly with the common and supposedly important point that flying is not a constitutionally guaranteed right, and that the government is therefore justified in setting onerous conditions, including waiving basic constitutionally guaranteed rights, on people who choose to fly. Or, as it is often put,"Flying isn't a right, it's a privilege." It's certainly true that the Constitution says nothing about a right to airplane travel. It also says nothing about any right to travel by any means, including your own legs. It says nothing about the right to buy food, or walk down the street, or go to a doctor, or to have a job, or to not have a job. There's no constitutionally enumerated legal right to perform basic biological functions like eating and drinking. I suppose a right to breathe is implicit in the right to freedom of speech, so at least we've got that going for us.

If the TSA search is voluntary, anything done to a person is voluntary provided that they are warned beforehand what will be done to them and under what circumstances it will be done. If subjecting unwilling flyers to degrading intrusions on their person and depriving them of their legal rights under the Fourth Amendment is excused because there's no constitutionally enumerated “right to fly,” then the government can legitimately place all sorts of onerous conditions on almost any activity imaginable.

Having accepted these premises, if some government agency decreed that anyone who entered a shopping mall could be required to submit to a police strip search at any time, or that anyone who traveled by car/taxi/train/boat/whatever had thereby waived their First Amendment rights, or that anyone who worked in the skilled trades was required to perform sexual favors for government licensing officials and their pals, what objection is possible? You could still criticize such requirements on the grounds that they're not effective for whatever their supposed purpose is, but you couldn't reasonably say that they were somehow oppressive or unjust. These things aren't rights, after all, and no one is forcing you to do any of them.

(It's especially amusing how often, now that Bush is out of office and many of his critics on the Left have dropped their pretense of caring about civil liberties, these argument are so often coming from the same quarters as arguments that consensual economic transactions are really coercion because of unequal bargaining power between the parties to the exchange or an insufficient number of available alternatives.)

A lot of people likely would regard this as a feature rather than a bug, to be sure. The standard pattern in American politics for any respectable political ideology is to regard almost every aspect of life as a legitimate area for technocratic government control, aside from a few exceptions set aside as more-or-less immune. Your right to talk/pray/copulate as much as you want is sacred; anything else you choose to do or not do in your life is a privilege, and you'd damn well better be grateful for it.