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?