I risk my life all the time for fun. Every time I venture out onto the roads, be that driving a vehicle, a passenger in a vehicle, or a pedestrian, I am risking my life. I go out onto the roads often to visit friends and family. And I sometimes even invite them over to my place, thus risking their lives.

Consequently the soldier case doesn’t bother me. I risk my life for the most immaterial of gains, why shouldn’t he if he wants to?

I do not think it is misleading to think that the availability of choices makes us freer. I believe that I am freer than a member of the Politburo in Stalinist USSR because I have more options, like the options of openly disagreeing with Stalin or with the current PM of New Zealand, without getting sent to a gulag or killed by an ice-pick. If the availability of options does not make us freer, what does?

Consequently I do not see how you are making your point that the having of options is close to morally irrelevant. Do you see no moral difference between offering a job to someone and pointing a gun at someone and demanding money? (If not, can you please provide a description of yourself, so I can avoid you in the future? )

And to me there is a massive difference between political power and the power that comes from increased wealth. The power of wealth can only be exercised by making the other person better off. (I am here ignoring the class of cases where a rich person bribes a public official to throw a business competitor in jail or hires a hitman to kill their father-in-law as these were not examples you picked when you worried about people being offered choices and anyway, pretty much any libertarian would object to such activities even more than to tax raises).

A wealthy person is as dependent on other people as a poor person is. Bill Gates does not grow his own food, and while he could maybe become self-sufficient in food production, he cannot do that and make his own healthcare, construct and run his own sewerage system, mine the ores and smelt them to make the metal to make his own computers, etc. He is dependent on other people to do many things for him. In a market economy, he must pay them. Since he is so high in the income distribution, he is highly dependent on people poorer than him. Yes, he can pay more people to do more things for him than the poor person can, but he is still dependent on their agreeing to do so.

My problem with guaranteed minimum incomes, or rights to healthcare/education/housing/etc is that, since we live in a world where manna, let alone healthcare, does not fall from the heaven, they imply a reduction in freedom for other people. To be more precise, since wealth is only created through labour, if people have a right to an income then someone who goes off to become a Buddhist nun is violating other people’s rights just as much as if she went around punching anyone who declared themselves to be a Christian.

It’s an offer if you’d rather have the choice than not and a threat if you would rather not face the choice. I personally think that other morally relevant issues often complicate the judgement and no “value-free” definition of threat/offer will do. But lots of people disagree with me including, I believe, Rhodes, Michael R. in his paper “The Nature of Coercion”, Journal of Value Inquiry, 34 (2/3)(2000).

I should not have said “choices limit their freedom vis a vis the wealthy”. It’s not having the choice per se that limits the accountant’s freedom compared to that enjoyed by the indepepdnently wealthy. (I can see how much of what you wrote was a response to that mistake of mine.) But the point I’m striving to make is that the mere having of choices is often much closer to morally irrelevant than morally decisive, especially when the choices are as unattractive as my hypothetical soldier’s.

So maybe I should have said: “The availability of choices, misleads us into thinking that the poor are not less free than the wealthy because of their dependence on the wealthy.”

Of course, I was also making the point that concentrated wealth generally (not wealthy individuals) translates into political power (power OVER those not party to that wealth, not power wielded BY individuals). But that’s a separate point.

However averse you are to guaranteed minimum incomes (and I’m not a defender myself), if you find the point about bad options reducing autonomy convincing then you might want to consider whether guaranteed minimum incomes would increase autonomy.

GENERAL ARGUMENT
If you want to see who’s better off, who’s more autonomous, and who’s subject to others’ power (maybe no ones in particular) then just noting that one person got threatened and the other got an offer is not going tell you the whole story. Ceteris paribus anyone would usually rather get an offer than a threat, but its easy to exagerate the relevance of this in many important cases.

You are changing what you are arguing here from what you said at the start.
But wealth inequality is, in large part, responsible for the power inequalities you identify.
…
people lacking independent means are being put to unattractive choices all of the time that limit their freedom vis a vis the wealthy. It is largely irrelevant that these choices involve offers not threats.

You are now stating a different proposition. You first were arguing that differences in wealth meant that some people were facing choices that limited their freedom. Now you are stating that the question of who is better off can’t be answered just by looking at who has received an offer or a threat.

Of course under many situations someone offered a choice may be worse off than someone else who has been threatened. But this does not mean that being offered a choice limits your freedom, like a threat does.

KIDNAPPING
I can see I should have given some definitions of “offer” or “threat” earlier. One can construct a situation in such you can make a statement using the word “offer” but the situation is actually a threat. E.g. the mafia’s ‘offer’ to join a neighbourhood protection league after having made it obvious that you are being protected from the mafia burning down your house if you don’t join.

So, in the case of the kidnapping, if the call is from the kidnappers then it’s a part of a threat, and part of a crime. If it is from an informed bystander (not part of the kidnappers’ plot) then it’s an offer (at that price, I think a deeply immoral offer, but an offer, not a threat).

Consider the kidnapping happened, you got the phone call, your son was returned alive and unharmed, the police caught the kidnappers and whoever made the offer (this may be the same person). Surely in this case the police in deciding what charges to lay, would consider if the offerer was part of the kidnapping plot or an informed bystander to the kidnapping seeking to make money from returning your son? (I have no idea how American law would actually treat the “informed bystander” situation, and it probably varies from state-to-state, but I suspect that it would make a difference, it would in NZ).

If it is an offer, for a $100,000 for information to let you retrieve your son, here I would step away from a strict application of libertarianism, and say, along with Posner, that in this case the common law concept of necessity comes into play and you could not be held to a contract to pay $100,000, just as if there is only one port for a ship in a storm (and the ship would otherwise sink), the common law holds that a ship is only required to pay the normal going rate for mooring there. In this case, there isn’t a normal going rate for information about where kidnapped sons are, so a payment for actual costs and time, plus a bit extra would make sense.

ARMY PAY RATES
Thank you for answering my question on army pay rates. It is an interesting answer, that having poor other options reduces your autonomy. I suspect that you are always going to think that people are being pushed into the army, since as living standards increase army conditions have to increase to attract staff. (And we can say the same for other jobs that require risking your life, such as firefighting.)

Suppose my son is kidnapped, I know not by whom. I get a phone call from someone offering to provide info about how to get him back if I deposit $100,000 in a certain account. Is this a threat or an offer? Does it matter if the caller is affiliated with the kidnapper? If you’re tempted to say its an offer either way simply because it makes me better off than having no idea how to rescue my son, then ask yourself: How is this different from someone calling me and saying, “If you ever want to see your son again deposit…” etc. That would be a threat right?

But I do think that some moral baseline has to come into play because the question is not just: “Was he better or worse off after the threat/offer?” but also “Better or worse off relative to what?” If the starting point is unacceptable (because non-autonomous or for some other reason) then just knowing whether it was a threat or offer won’t tell us all we want to know. So, I agree with you that there are contentious value judgements involved regarding the question of what one should be able to expect. But I disagree insofar as your answer to that question is just: “to be however well-off, autonomous, etc. she happened to be before the threat/offer”.

If you want to see who’s better off, who’s more autonomous, and who’s subject to others’ power (maybe no ones in particular) then just noting that one person got threatened and the other got an offer is not going tell you the whole story. Ceteris paribus anyone would usually rather get an offer than a threat, but its easy to exagerate the relevance of this in many important cases.

-

I didn’t answer your question about the soldier because that is not what this thread is about. This thread is about whether governmental extravagence is ignored while private wealth is unfairly maligned. I took issue with that whole rubric and pointed out ways in which private wealth transmutes into political power and diminished autonomy.

But okay:

If the least attractive civilian jobs were more attractive, that would reduce the chance that someone joins the military for the non-autonomous reason that all their other options suck. Not everyone joins for this reason, but many do.

(I am quite happy to refer to the United States, as a country not the government per se, as threatening people with poor job prospects into joining the military. I’m sure that notion would make your blood boil.)

Person (b) is either better off, or at worse not any worse off for receiving the job offer.

Person (a) may or may not be worse off. That is a complicated question. Thus it gets a more complicated answer and people argue about it a lot more.

Consequently I do not worry about person (b) getting a job offer. Person (b) being offered a job, even a boring job with long hours, is GOOD. Person (b) getting ten job offers is BETTER. Person (b) having no skills is BAD.

Is there anyway I can make this more clear? Job offer GOOD.

I think our problem may be the counterfactual. I am treating the counterfactual here as person (b) does not get a job offer, and person (a) does not have taxes raised on them. I do not know what your counterfactual is. A world where person (b) is highly skilled and independently wealthy? Fine to imagine such a world and to work towards it, but how does offering a job or not move person (b) closer to there? (Please take this as resisting your points.)

I said that CERTAIN offers left their recipient in a worse position than CERTAIN threats left their recipients.
But the job offer to person (b), as long as he can refuse it, does not leave him in a worse-off position compared to the counterfactual of not having a job offer.
Meanwhile the threat of raising taxes may leave person (a) in a worse-off position compared to the counter-factual of not having taxes raised.

Of course person (b) may still be worse off after reciving the job offer than person (a) is worse off after getting a tax raise. But person (b)’s position has still improved compared to if they had no job offer.

But, in the broader social context, people lacking independent means are being put to unattractive choices all of the time that limit their freedom vis a vis the wealthy. It is largely irrelevant that these choices involve offers not threats.
…
I never said that the offerees in my examples were worse off than they would have been with no offer.
You sound very much to me like you are being contradictory here. Threats generally leave people worse off. If it is largely irrelevant that these choices involve offers, not threats, then this implies that you are arguing that the offerees are worse off for receiving the offers, in the same way as I and my friend were worse off for receiving the threats.

that they are worse off (also less autonomous) than they should have to be relative to those with more wealth and (2) that the offer, to the extent it makes them better off, comes at a price often neglected by the autonomy-minded libertarian.

Okay. Firstly “than they should have to be” implies a whole moral theory behind it about what relative wealth differentials should be. I’ll point out that you’re unlikely to command universal agreement to whatever this theory is.

“that the offer, to the extent it makes them better off, comes at a price often neglected by the autonomy-minded libertarian.”
Secondly, okay, so now I am to be my brother’s conscience, and the conscience of everyone else in the world. I am to sit over each job offer they receive, and decide whether it is morally better or worse for them to accept or deny it. This is too big a problem, there are some 6 billion people in the world, I simply cannot worry about how they balance their morals for each and every decision they make. The prices they pay and the benefits they take must, within a broad framework, be up to them. And let their decisions be on their conscience. (This is why libertarians neglect this price, this is perhaps the essence of libertarianism, the idea that people are morally responsible for themselves, and just because you disagree with a decision does not mean you have the right to stop them from making it).

You are also ignoring my question of how members of the armed forces should be treated. If it is bad to reward poor people for risking their lives for their country since it encourages them to do so, how should the armed forces be treated?

I said that CERTAIN offers left their recipient in a worse position than CERTAIN threats left their recipients. And then I “offered” the comparison of persons (a) and (b). You didn’t address that comparison. If you don’t want to compare those people’s plight then that’s fine.

I never said that the offerees in my examples were worse off than they would have been with no offer. (With the possible exception of the soldier who might well have been better of taking (b)’s uninteresting, long-hour job stateside.)

My points about the accountant, loan officer, lawyer, and soldier were (1) that they are worse off (also less autonomous) than they should have to be relative to those with more wealth and (2) that the offer, to the extent it makes them better off, comes at a price often neglected by the autonomy-minded libertarian. Namely, if the accept it, they will be required to do things that are bad for them, bad for the economy, etc.

You are not really resisting THESE points at all.