Dial back the rhetoric. We can indirectly accuse others of all sorts of mental shortcomings, but we aren’t very well placed to judged. Instead, let’s actually compare the bases for our ideas in facts and logic, and see which world-view better captures observation. Refusing to play when a discussion doesn’t consist of mutual ego-stroking is intellectually dishonest. We’re each of us wrong about something, maybe it’s this. Entertain the idea that when someone disagrees with you, it could be you who is mistaken; I will do my best to do the same.
These claims are too strong. You’re telling me that when you go to the store and buy a soda, your decision is coerced? It doesn’t seem so, unless we give advertising so much credit to think that it controls our lives, in which case buy a Pepsi and enjoy dancing on a boardwalk with a model in roller-skates.
Certainly some decisions are coerced, like, most recently, the decision to buy health insurance. But even then, you have a choice of what health insurance: you could buy cadillac insurance, or ideological insurance that doesn’t cover birth control. Other coerced decisions are that you aren’t able to buy a car without seatbelts, or to fly in a pilot-less plane. But these are distortions of the market, not its complete destruction. In many cases, there aren’t even explicit laws defining how one must e.g. design a product. Instead, people are held accountable by law for the damage their products do, and as a result people choose to spend more time making their products safe. Does it distort a free market? Yes, but a completely free market fails when, as in this example, there is incomplete information by one party about the good or service they’re getting. If people could cheaply obtain complete information about how safe a product is, products liability would probably be unnecessary. Instead, we have a system that assigns the cost of poor information to the person most in control of the safety of the product. Coercive, yes, but coercion for the purpose of internalizing a cost not captured otherwise in the exchange.
Actually, a general argument against money, which I don’t recall seeing here, could be based on just this phenomenon:
One is generally much better informed about an abstract medium of exchange than about the good or service for which it’s being exchanged. Money thus creates information asymmetry by making the consumer less informed than the seller. This will be true in almost every exchange for money, except when money is exchanged for other liquid or nearly liquid assets like commodities, or perhaps securities like stock whose value does not derive from their utility; in these case, the variation in the value of money will be about equal to the variation in the value of the thing being exchanged for money.
This is true, but equal benefit is not necessary for there to be common benefit. If I have a red ball and like green slightly more, and you have a green ball and like red a lot more, if we trade balls we both benefit, though you benefit more.
Nor is common benefit necessary for social benefit. If I am color blind, and you are not color blind and prefer red to green, you are benefitted if we trade balls and I am made no worse off. If you and I constitute a society, the society as a whole is better off, because this transaction has improved your situation without causing me any loss, thus increasing net value.
The worry I think comes in two parts. The first is that one person may be benefitting over and over again, while the other is not, such that society as a whole works to improve one person’s well-being without improving the well-being of another. The second part is that the person who benefits more from one exchange will be in a place to rig future exchanges to increase her benefit. Together, these would tend to enhance each other, so that if the second is true, the first becomes more destructive. This I think is what you mean when you refer to economic slavery.
It’s a problem, but it’s partly why we have paternalistic governments. The best governments will help to reduce this rigging-of-the-game. But there’s a fine balance to be maintained so that government itself doesn’t become another way to rig the game. The transition from monarchy to democracy did a lot to reduce this, but it has not been perfect, and it seems that government is doing less now to prevent it. This is probably why Jefferson advocated regular revolutions to re-level society.
Further reforms can further improve the fairness of markets to maximize the spread of social benefits, and it is still the case, despite all this, that each such exchange creates more value for society, even though it means society does more for some than for others.