A very common criticism of the libertarian position runs as follows: Of course we do not like violence, and libertarians perform a useful service in stressing its dangers. But you are very simpliste because you ignore the other significant forms of coercion exercised in society—private coercive power, apart from the violence wielded by the State or the criminal. The government should stand ready to employ its coercion to check or offset this private coercion.

In the first place, this seeming difficulty for libertarian doctrine may quickly be removed by limiting the concept of coercion to the use of violence. This narrowing would have the further merit of strictly confining the legalized violence of the police and the judiciary to the sphere of its competence: combatting violence. But we can go even further, for we can show the inherent contradictions in the broader concept of coercion.

A well-known type of “private coercion” is the vague but ominous-sounding “economic power.” A favorite illustration of the wielding of such “power” is the case of a worker fired from his job, especially by a large corporation. Is this not “as bad as” violent coercion against the property of the worker? Is this not another, subtler form of robbery of the worker, since he is being deprived of money that he would have received if the employer had not wielded his “economic power”?

Let us look at this situation closely. What exactly has the employer done? He has refused to continue to make a certain exchange, which the worker preferred to continue making. Specifically, A, the employer, refuses to sell a certain sum of money in exchange for the purchase of B’s labor services. B would like to make a certain exchange; A would not. The same principle may apply to all the exchanges throughout the length and breadth of the economy. A worker exchanges labor for money with an employer; a retailer exchanges eggs for money with a customer; a patient exchanges money with a doctor for his services; and so forth. Under a regime of freedom, where no violence is permitted, every man has the power either to make or not to make exchanges as and with whom he sees fit. Then, when exchanges are made, both parties benefit. We have seen that if an exchange is coerced, at least one party loses. It is doubtful whether even a robber gains in the long run, for a society in which violence and tyranny are practiced on a large scale will so lower productivity and become so much infected with fear and hate that even the robbers may be unhappy when they compare their lot with what it might be if they engaged in production and exchange in the free market.

“Economic power,” then, is simply the right under freedom to refuse to make an exchange. Every man has this power. Every man has the same right to refuse to make a proffered exchange.

Now, it should become evident that the “middle-of-the-road” statist, who concedes the evil of violence but adds that the violence of government is sometimes necessary to counteract the “private coercion of economic power,” is caught in an impossible contradiction. A refuses to make an exchange with B. What are we to say, or what is the government to do, if B brandishes a gun and orders A to make the exchange? This is the crucial question. There are only two positions we may take on the matter: either that B is committing violence and should be stopped at once, or that B is perfectly justified in taking this step because he is simply “counteracting the subtle coercion” of economic power wielded by A. Either the defense agency must rush to the defense of A, or it deliberately refuses to do so, perhaps aiding B (or doing B’s work for him). There is no middle ground!

B is committing violence; there is no question about that. In the terms of both doctrines, this violence is either invasive and therefore unjust, or defensive and therefore just. If we adopt the “economic-power” argument, we must choose the latter position; if we reject it, we must adopt the former. If we choose the “economic-power” concept, we must employ violence to combat any refusal of exchange; if we reject it, we employ violence to prevent any violent imposition of exchange. There is no way to escape this either-or choice. The “middle-of-the-road” statist cannot logically say that there are “many forms” of unjustified coercion. He must choose one or the other and take his stand accordingly. Either he must say that there is only one form of illegal coercion—overt physical violence—or he must say that there is only one form of illegal coercion—refusal to exchange.

We have already fully described the sort of society built on libertarian foundations—a society marked by peace, harmony, liberty, maximum utility for all, and progressive improvement in living standards. What would be the consequence of adopting the “economic-power” premise? It would be a society of slavery: for what else is prohibiting the refusal to work? It would also be a society where the overt initiators of violence would be treated with kindness, while their victims would be upbraided as being “really” responsible for their own plight. Such a society would be truly a war of all against all, a world in which conquest and exploitation would rage unchecked.

Let us analyze further the contrast between the power of violence and “economic power,” between, in short, the victim of a bandit and the man who loses his job with the Ford Motor Company. Let us symbolize, in each case, the alleged power-wielder as P and the supposed victim as X. In the case of the bandit or robber, P plunders X. P lives, in short, by battening off X and all the other X’s. This is the meaning of power in its original, political sense. But what of “economic power”? Here, by contrast, X, the would-be employee, is asserting a strident claim to P’s property! In this case, X is plundering P instead of the other way around. Those who lament the plight of the automobile worker who cannot obtain a job with Ford do not seem to realize that before Ford and without Ford there would be no such job to be obtained at all. No one, therefore, can have any sort of “natural right” to a Ford job, whereas it is meaningful to assert a natural right to liberty, a right which each person may have without depending on the existence of others (such as Ford). In short, the libertarian doctrine, which proclaims a natural right of defense against political power, is coherent and meaningful, but any proclaimed right of defense against “economic power” makes no sense at all. Here, indeed, are enormous differences between the two concepts of “power.”21

• 21On the spurious problems of “bargaining power,” see Scoville and Sargent, Fact and Fancy in the T.N.E.C. Monographs, pp. 312–13; and W.H. Hutt, Theory of Collective Bargaining (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954), Part I.

It is quite common and even fashionable to discuss market phenomena in terms of “power”—that is, in terms appropriate only to the battlefield. We have seen the fallacy of the “back-to-the-jungle” criticism of the market and we have seen how the fallacious “economic-power” concept has been applied to the exchange economy. Political-power terminology, in fact, often dominates discussions of the market: peaceful businessmen are “economic royalists,” “economic feudalists,” or “robber barons.” Business is called a “system of power,” and firms are “private governments,” and, if they are very large, even “empires.” Less luridly, men have “bargaining power,” and business firms engage in “strategies” and “rivalry” as in military battles. Recently, theories of “games” and strategy have been erroneously applied to market activity, even to the absurd extent of comparing market exchange with a “zero-sum game”—an interrelation in which A’s loss is precisely equal to B’s gain.

This, of course, is the action of coercive power, of conquest and robbery. There, one man’s gain is another man’s loss; one man’s victory, another’s defeat. Only conflict can describe these social relations. But the opposite is true on the free market, where everyone is a “victor” and everyone gains from social relations. The language and concepts of political power are singularly inappropriate in the free-market society.

The fundamental confusion here is the failure to distinguish between two very different concepts: power over nature and power over man.

It is easy to see that an individual’s power is his ability to control his environment in order to satisfy his wants. A man with an ax has the power to chop down a tree; a man with a factory has the power, along with other complementary factors, to produce capital goods. A man with a gun has the power to force an unarmed man to do his bidding, provided that the unarmed man chooses not to resist or not to accept death at gunpoint. It should be clear that there is a basic distinction between the two types of power. Power over nature is the sort of power on which civilization must be built; the record of man’s history is the record of the advance or attempted advance of that power. Power over men, on the other hand, does not raise the general standard of living or promote the satisfactions of all, as does power over nature. By its very essence, only some men in society can wield power over men. Where power over man exists, some must be the powerful, and others must be objects of power. But every man can and does achieve power over nature.

In fact, if we look at the basic condition of man as he enters the world, it is obvious that the only way to preserve his life and advance himself is to conquer nature—to transform the face of the earth to satisfy his wants. From the point of view of all the members of the human race, it is obvious that only such a conquest is productive and life-sustaining. Power of one man over another cannot contribute to the advance of mankind; it can only bring about a society in which plunder has replaced production, hegemony has supplanted contract, violence and conflict have taken the place of the peaceful order and harmony of the market. Power of one man over another is parasitic rather than creative, for it means that the nature conquerors are subjected to the dictation of those who conquer their fellowman instead. Any society of force—whether ruled by criminal bands or by an organized State—fundamentally means the rule of the jungle, or economic chaos. Furthermore, it would be a jungle, a struggle in the sense of the Social Darwinists, in which the survivors would not really be the “fittest,” for the “fitness” of the victors would consist solely in their ability to prey on producers. They would not be the ones best fitted for advancing the human species: these are the producers, the conquerors of nature.

The libertarian doctrine, then, advocates the maximization of man’s power over nature and the eradication of the power of man over man. Statists, in elevating the latter power, often fail to realize that in their system man’s power over nature would wither and become negligible.

Albert Jay Nock was aiming at this dichotomy when, in Our Enemy the State, he distinguished between social power and State power.22 Those who properly balk at any terms that seem to anthropomorphize “society” were wary of accepting this terminology. But actually this distinction is a very important one. Nock’s “social power” is society’s—mankind’s—conquest of nature: the power that has helped to produce the abundance that man has been able to wrest from the earth. His “State power” is political power—the use of the political means as against the “economic means” to wealth. State power is the power of man over man—the wielding of coercive violence by one group over another.

Nock used these categories to analyze historical events in brilliant fashion. He saw the history of mankind as a race between social power and State power. Always man—led by the producers—has tried to advance the conquest of his natural environment. And always men—other men—have tried to extend political power in order to seize the fruits of this conquest over nature. History can then be interpreted as a race between social power and State power. In the more abundant periods, e.g., after the Industrial Revolution, social power takes a large spurt ahead of political power, which has not yet had a chance to catch up. The stagnant periods are those in which State power has at last come to extend its control over the newer areas of social power. State power and social power are antithetical, and the former subsists by draining the latter. Clearly, the concepts advanced here—”power over nature” and “power over man”— are generalizations and clarifications of Nock’s categories.

One problem may appear puzzling: What is the nature of “purchasing power” on the market? Is this not power over man and yet “social” and on the free market? However, this contradiction is only apparent. Money has “purchasing power” only because other men are willing to accept it in exchange for goods, i.e., because they are eager to exchange. The power to exchange rests—on both sides of the exchange—on production, and this is precisely the conquest of nature that we have been discussing. In fact, it is the exchange process—the division of labor—that permits man’s power over nature to extend beyond the primitive level. It was power over nature that the Ford Motor Company had developed in such abundance, and it was this power that the angry job seeker was threatening to seize—by political power—while complaining about Ford’s “economic power.”

In sum, political-power terminology should be applied only to those employing violence. The only “private governments” are those people and organizations aggressing against persons and property that are not part of the official State dominating certain territory. These “private States,” or private governments, may either co-operate with the official State, as did the governments of the guilds in the Middle Ages, and as labor unions and cartelists do today, or they may compete with the official State and be designated as “criminals” or “bandits.”

• 22Nock, Our Enemy the State.