Difficult indeed.

An ordinary American internet user consents to countless pages of legalese in adhesion and other unread contracts (TOSs, privacy policies and so on) everyday day. These days, every website, piece of software, digital service or product comes with pages upon pages of contracts to which the user must consent to even walk in the door. Reading all of them is easily a full time job.

So, no one has coerced anyone into anything, just a bunch of consenting parties in theory.

In practice, getting consumers to throw away their rights and consent to stridently anti-competitive behavior by companies seems kind of easy.

Taken in the sense of an economy of mutual consent, "free market" is too low a bar to hop over. I can see why people don't think that the barebones style of "free market" is very free.

This is a deep discussion to have: too deep for a medium like HN. That being said...

Your points pre-suppose parties consented to a dispute resolution system: one that is based on arbitrary boundaries and quite monopolistic (1).

> I can see why people don't think that the barebones style of "free market" is very free.

So, I agree that it is hard for people to understand what consent is when they were never given a chance to choose which dispute resolution system(s) they can participate in.

(1) Example being I was born in the USA so somehow automatically consented to the rules of the land.

"(1) Example being I was born in the USA so somehow automatically consented to the rules of the land."

Your parents consented on your behalf when you were born. Parents everywhere are entitled to make legal decisions for their offspring before the children reach the age of majority; this is what yours did for you.

When you reached the age of majority, you suddenly gained the freedom to consent on your own (by remaining) or reject the terms of living in your country of origin (by leaving).

There's no mystery about being ensnared into something you didn't ask for; your parents did so for you, following a tradition and law as universal and old as time.

What you say is true much of the time, but it is also true that consumers often do "choose" their arbiter. The aforementioned adhesion contracts often stipulate a private (non-government) arbiter, which the consumer (probably you, too) consents to of their own free will.

I see your points. But I kind of feel like we were having a rather nuts and bolts discussion about how to improve security in Linux, and then someone chimes in that we should probably rewrite everything in Haskell.

If achieving a free market requires a complete upheaval of all of our governments and laws, then the idea isn't very useful.

> If achieving a free market requires a complete upheaval of all of our governments and laws, then the idea isn't very useful.

The idea is extremely useful: act consensual to others. There is no better basis of a social system than this. Having conversations like the one were having now is really all we need. To force the ideas on others in anyway, especially through democracy, would be hypocritical.

A social system based on utility, which is basically all social systems we've had throughout history, is violent, aggressive and dangerous. No wonder history repeats itself.

The existence of property is based on a non-consensual model for the purpose of utility.

Which is forced upon others through threat of violence. And was obtained via violence in the first place.

You're given that chance every day you choose not to go elsewhere where the legal situation is more to your liking. The social contract has an opt-out. But that'd be hard, so...

There being no good place to move because every other government also allows these things, is a sort of monopoly problem of its own...

Have you considered that maybe there are reasons for that that don't involve the twirling of mustachios?

"Consent or die" is not a choice, but on free market it is.

The ability of consensual exchange to increase utility for both parties frays at the limits of the ability of the parties giving consent to predict the results of their decision. Our ability to express the inherent failings of consensual contracts requires us to understand the limits of our own predictive power, which turns out to be a monstrously difficult scientific question.

However, it seems to me that, if one party to a negotiation takes actions which are intended to limit the other's understanding of the exchange, the usefulness of consent as a mechanism to prevent bad trades is degraded. This is not quite violence, but it is scummy, and it doesn't seem that it would be "anti-capitalist" to restrict it.

Fully agree. It wouldn't surprise me if acting 'scummy' was considered, by at least one party, to be non-consensual.

That's the American libertarian definition.