Catherine, agreed that it’s great we still have (substantial) freedom of speech!
I don’t think a market needs to be “maintained” in the sense of requiring regulation. I just think a true free market doesn’t exist until force has been extracted from social relations. A legitimate government is one whose sole function is to extract force from social relationships and thereby protect rights. In that case, what would it mean, as you say, “to submit to an entity which rules by coercion its not a voluntary choice”?
In my view, it would mean only that if one initiates force, one will be met with force. In a “state of nature” prior to the organization of a government, that force would be wielded by whomever happened to take it upon himself to respond to me, and there would be no preset limits on what his response should be. By contrast, a legitimate government puts objective limits on the use of retaliatory force, such that responses to force are measured and fair. I don’t see how that is an imposition on anyone.
