When We Meet Again, It Won't Be Me.

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick urges law-abiding Texans to pay for his gendarmes' coffee and pie when they see them out and about enjoying Dale Cooper's preferred repast.

The relevant text (link):

I challenge all Texans to think about how underappreciated our officers must feel, how dangerous their jobs are, how they leave their families everyday not knowing if they are coming home and more importantly, if there is anything you can do to help make their job a little easier. 

Join me in changing this negative attitude toward those that protect us, by practicing the following:

• Start calling our officers sir and ma’am all of the time. It’s a show of respect they deserve.
• Every time you see an officer anywhere, let them know you appreciate their service to our community and you stand with them.
• If you are financially able, when you see them in a restaurant on duty pick up their lunch check, send over a dessert, or simply stop by their table briefly and say thank you for their service.
• Put their charities on your giving list.
• If your local law enforcement has volunteer-citizen job opportunities, sign up.

For more on the opportunistic politics of the press release, read Mark Bennett here. For remarks on how the sentiments behind the statement obfuscate the central issues of excessively expansive criminal codes and police incompetence, read Scott Greenfield here. For a great deal of heat and very little light, you can scroll through my twitter timeline a day prior to the publication of this post. You can follow me here.

I have nothing to add on the moral, legal, or social aspects of Lt. Gov. Patrick's call for obeisance. Well, apart from snickering at the fact that he's asking constituents to commit what might in other circumstances be considered bribery (if you've ever worked DoD procurement, you'll know what I mean). I will however comment on the economics.

Patrick is calling for side payments, what economists might call "non-pecuniary benefits" paid directly to his praetorians by citizens. He's asking for a compensating differential, in other words. The converse of the "employees with hazardous duties must receive additional pay to induce them to accept the job" is that employees with marginally more pleasant work environments will not so vigorously insist on higher salaries. Rational taxpayers should welcome any opportunity to reduce their annual share of tribute to the constabulary, and for people like me, middle-aged white parents who might also be veterans, the marginal cost of using the sort of language that was drilled into us in boot camp is negligible. I fancy myself to be a fairly affable sort, even if that might not extend to paying for a cop's dessert.

But willingness-to-pay is linked to value, which is subjective. My subjective cost to greet a police officer with a smile and a polite, "how may I help you today, sir?" is considerably lower than someone at greater risk of being the target of a no-knock raid or a spurious traffic stop. Patrick's request is, to use a technical term, regressive. Regressive not in the sense that it's barbaric or reactionary, but regressive in the sense that lower income citizens pay a larger share of their income or wealth than do higher income citizens. Of course, since we're talking about non-cash payment, you have to squint your eyes a little and picture "income" as including things like peace of mind, patience, forbearance, tolerance, and the like. Imagine some sort of mental budget where you have a limited capacity to treat with kindness a class of people who can slaughter your pets and murder your kin in the streets with impunity.

So Mark's mostly right when he says that the list of demands is a dog whistle from the ruling class to the praetorian guard, but there's also a wink and a nod to the comfortable, middle-class, law-abiding citizens not at risk of falling into the "undesirables" category. NORPs like me aren't being asked to much change our behavior. Dusky complexioned Texans from the wrong side of the tracks are.

As for the moral intuition here, I think reasonable people can disagree. It is certainly individually prudent to defer to people who carry guns as part of their official duties. However, it is institutionally bonkers to maintain policies and legislation that grant these people unfettered, extensive authority to intervene into private, otherwise peaceful affairs. Consider the possibility that it might be easier for members of the black community to speak respectfully to an officer if they knew they were at lower risk for being pulled over on a DWB or if they didn't have to fear SWAT busting in at 2am to the wrong address because some dyslexic clerk botched the house number on the warrant application.

How BATNA is Now?

Noah vs. Eli on the role of government.

@elidourado AGREED AGREED AGREED. So the constant libertarian talk about the "size of government" seems a little silly to me.
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) November 13, 2014

Economics is unambiguous on only a small handful of issues. One of these is that individuals, organizations, and even states are at their most productive when they confine their activities to where they enjoy a comparative advantage. By doing so, they can be as productive as they are able, and can then trade their surplus for all the other wonderful things they wish to consume.

Governments have a comparative advantage in using the tools of force to promote law and order.

I can't speak for libertarians generally, but if I fall into using the "government size" trope, what I would probably mean is "government reach," a lament about the activities of government that lie outside the scope of its comparative advantage. Legislating against consensual sex work, for example, obliges vice cops to harass peaceful sex workers, thereby passing up the natural alternative use of their time by seeking out and prosecuting forcible child prostitution. For me, "size" isn't a budget issue; it's a scope of practice issue.

We are in the BATNA now. We are exploited and oppressed, particularly those of us who are poor or minorities. Liberals, conservatives, and libertarians of good conscience should consider an alliance to restore to the state its primary function as keeper of the Constitution and protector of the public order. Universal state-funded day care is a slightly lower priority than ending the mundane tyrannies of the various wars on crime, drugs, terror & al.

The IPO is not Dead Yet: a Rejoinder

Via TC, Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits on le Twitter) interviews Marc Andreessen (@pmarca). ATSRTWT.

I don't mean this to sound as obnoxious as I know it will, but it's hard to find an economically literate venture capitalist. Let me explain.

Economic literacy is not the same thing as financial literacy, not by a long shot. Economists pierce the illusion of money to study the underlying phenomenon of the exchange of value. If you've taken a graduate course in microeconomics or game theory, you'll recognize this habit in all those equations that use derived utility in lieu of cash. Even in undergraduate courses, you'll very often hear philosophical musings on what money is, how money differs from currency, how income differs from wealth, and even more fundamentally, that the beans you use to reckon accounts are nothing more than social agreements: implicit claims on one half of a (eu)voluntary exchange. Economics is a philosophical discipline. Yes, it's more practical than metaphysics, more earthy than epistemology, more stubborn and piggish than aesthetics. Despite that, it's still devoted chiefly to answering not-obvious questions about the hidden treasures of human existence.

Financial literacy, contrarily, is a matter of arithmetic. The two are related in that the topic of study is relative prices, institutions, and exchange, but finance studies the metrics exclusively, without fussing about with all the underlying utility arguments. And well that it doesn't. The philosophical underpinnings of trade, how true (not merely measured by bank account balances) wealth is generated, and how it is that people can be richer (happier, more fulfilled if you prefer) merely by reshuffling ownership over an existing stock of physical stuff—distracts the financier from the important business of probabilistic bean counting (the important difference between accounting and finance is timing: accounting is what you do after the fact, finance is what you do before the fact). Venture capitalists have an advantage in thinking carefully about the details of their business, the regulatory landscape, and the sorts of stuff people are likely to want to buy in the near future. However, they earn no beta, no additional returns, for thinking like a philosopher or an economist (and thank goodness for that).

So bear in mind that when Andreessen kvetches about Sarbanes-Oxley, the practical outcomes he identifies are financially literate. The econo-philosophical side would be keen to point out that stock market investment at its finest is democracy in action, where anyone with a little gumption and a few bucks in their pocket can signal that they believe in a firm's ability and willingness to serve customers. Investment is a way for anyone (of sound mind and majority age) to participate in the grand ballet of mutual benefit and service. Andreessen's worries about business volatility, quick-cycle rumor mongering, and dogfights between short and long sellers are symptoms of interference, but the cause is ultimately ideological and cultural. Constituents have ceded their sovereignty over trade in financial instruments to what Adam Smith called "men of system." The stock market is scary, so the median voter is comforted by the phantasm of stability brought on by the SEC, FTC, BCP, etc, etc. Lee extracts from Andreessen Bastiat's knell: the unseen results of this severe meddling is wretched de-democratization of the process of supporting new ventures.

On the bright side, Kickstarter and similar services have re-introduced little-d democracy back into the world of innovation. One of the great things that's happened in my lifetime is that creative people now have the ability to directly petition fans and potential customers for support. To me, that's precisely what the old-timey clickety-clack stock market is for. The noticeable difference is that instead of full-page IPO spreads in the WSJ, kids with cool ideas now make heartfelt (if formulaic) videos and publish to the Web. This I like. A lot. It's the new IPO.

Heh. The IPO is dying. Long live the IPO.

I Retract My Apology

Hello occupational licensing, my old friend. From Reason TV, via the Girl Poet:

I won't rehash arguments about how licensing has morphed from a consumer protection initiative into the institutionalized banditry you see above. That road is well-trod. Instead, I want to draw your attention to the point the video makes about CA state officials posting video on YouTube.

You can imagine the steam rising from HL Mencken's ears, can't you?

Put on your libertarian shoes for a moment and think about this. Step 1) Otherwise honest people want to make a (as far as I can tell) purely euvoluntary deal about landscaping or housepainting or something. Step 2) State enforcement agents step in and turn these people into criminals. Step 3) These same state officials, under the belief that they act in the public interest, share with the public footage of their activity. Step 5) From the public, crickets. There is no step four.

You don't have to be a staunch Nozickian to find this appalling. Indeed, I suspect you'd have to be well-blinkered to fail to characterize this as anything but above-board thuggery. And they're proud of it. I... I don't even have the words, people. Didn't the radical left of the 60's rail against The Man? This is The Man, on full display, grinningly showcasing its TheMannery for the wide world to see.

I'm not even sure whom to be ashamed of.

Okay, with this story, I now have to grudgingly admit that the looking-glass threshold has been well and crossed. The snout of the state has well and truly snuffled into the trough of euvoluntary exchange and there it browses, proudly showcasing its bedswerving flanks. I was wrong to apologize. Things really are as crazy as they seem.

Here are highlights from the original video:

Journalism

When "reporting" becomes ancillary to the regime, how many commonplace transactions become non-euvoluntary?

Will it or no, and I make no character assessments whether you do or don't, your commerce o'er amber waves of grain suffuses agents of the state with the lard they seek to pack the bearings of the war engines sent abroad to rain fire and death.

Don't get me wrong. I admit some bias as a pacifist, but I acknowledge that with unbiased (and by this, I mean the technical definition bit where omissions are random rather than systematically skewed) information, the median voter could still pretty easily come to the conclusion that violence against foreign nationals could be consistent with a rational moral and economic calculus. I might disagree with the rationale that leads to such an outcome, but the thing is, when (h/t Abby Hall) the Secretary of Defense refers to "intervention" in Syria as an option, it beggars belief that a responsible journalist would parrot this language. Or ever stoop to using the term "kinetic action" or any of the other kayfabe-laden doublespeak that oozes from between the lips of politicians.

Commerce that sends tax money to DC to fund fluffy bunny wars isn't euvoluntary.

Commerce that sends tax money to DC to rain hellfire on schools and orphanages is euvoluntary, provided that a) you're aware that this is part of the cost of war and b) you agree that the marginal benefits outweigh the marginal costs.

That the news organizations have selected for editors and journalists who dutifully refrain from approaching the regime with such skepticism suggests to me that the median voter, if better informed, would more likely find foreign aggression to lie a bit further afield from the national interest.

Also, this is probably more of a tweet than a blog comment, but if you really worry deeply about the plight of the oppressed, perhaps a better solution is to offer asylum instead of marching off to war. Just sayin'.

Should It Be Illegal to Buy Hair?

Women's hair is quite valuable.  A good head* of long hair is worth at least $500.  Hard to trace, easy to sell. 

So, people are stealing it.  Especially in the "People's Paradise" that Sean Penn (pronounced by as "Champagne!" by Emilio) is such a fan of, for the poor people.

My question:  is the purchase of human hair wigs ethical, given that the chances of it being stolen hair are increasing?

Before you answer, remember that saying "No, make human hair wigs illegal" will substantially increase their value.  And that will make the black market demand for stealing hair go UP, making the problem worse.  All you get by making wigs illegal is that warm "I'm a do-gooder, and I like to do good!" feeling.  You actually hurt poor people with your moral smugness.

Of course, it may be worth it.  Moral smugness is VERY valuable.


*Don't start.

GDP vs. EE, Macro Policy Edition

Macro is hard. Remaining circumspect while you're doing it is harder yet. The peer-reviewed theoretical literature (or at least the papers I'm familiar with) seems eerily divorced from the agents under scrutiny, and the empirical work is a glass crowbar: nice to look at, but when you try to use it to move stuff around, it has a tendency to break. Perhaps more frustrating for regular folks, the public debate is esoteric, weirdly partisan, and boring as all get-out (with the occasional exception for rap videos).

Macro policy itself is not an exchange in the same sense as buying a taco or swapping credit default risk. Instead, it influences the environment in which these exchanges are made. Stimulus programs are passed under the justification that the government spending will ignite consumer spending, taking some slack out of idle resources. FOMC transactions put more current assets into circulation, lowering interest rates, which reduces borrowing costs, which I suppose is meant to make investment decisions more attractive? I'm not entirely clear on this point. Firms that make decisions underpinned by cheap paper strike me as imprudent, much the same way that families buying more housing than they can reasonably afford are imprudent. Also, TANSTAAFL: cheap credit is an intertemporal transfer.

So that's some of the baggage I bring with me. I'm a phantomweight in the macro arena though, scarcely in the audience let alone in the debate itself. I have no dog in the fight, so to speak. I am interested in marginal euvoluntary exchange though. And I'm interested in pedestrian intuitions. I assume that my regular reader(s) are too, else you wouldn't waste your time by reading me.

So how about it then? Let's assume that there is a chunk of commerce that does occur because and only because of government spending. The DoT plops down $26B on road construction that wouldn't have otherwise happened. Or the DoE pushes $15B into "Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Recovery," funding that otherwise would have sat idle, rusting in a field somewhere while discouraged workers' human capital depreciates on the couch watching daytime TV. Let's just assume for the sake of argument that proponents are right and the Broken Window Fallacy does not apply with fallow resources. Are these exchanges euvoluntary?

Maybe this question is misguided. Maybe the right answer is "it depends." How would you approach the question? What's the role of time, of discovery, of risk, of opportunity? When do cyclical effects become structural? When does the short term become the long term? Most importantly, how are ordinary citizens supposed to keep track of these questions when they're alienated from the discussion by dint of education, inept reporting, and strident disagreement between even the top echelon experts in the subject?

When the rule of law is working well, it gives regular folks a bit of certainty in a chaotic world. Rules closely observed serve ordinary people in their ordinary lives. The abrogation thereof serves whom exactly?

Procrustean GDP pursuit may well be oversold. Caveat subfragator. These are important questions, don't hesitate to ask them.

Nudity and Food Service

BBQ joint in TX on the receiving end of a cease-n-desist for body paint-n-pasty food service following customer complaints.

ATSRTWT (SFW)

One of the four reducible forms of a simple game is the BoS game. Some authors will call it Bach or Stravinsky, but the original name is Battle of the Sexes. It goes like this:

A husband and wife both want to go out for the night. The husband wants to see a Bach performance and the wife wants to see a Stravinsky performance. Each would prefer to see their own more than the other's, but they'd rather see the other's than to stay home and watch another soul-crushing episode of Dancing With The Bears or whatever lurid crap is found on the TV. Negotiations ensue. This game is interesting in pure game theory because it helps students understand mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium and to get a fix on the Folk Theorem a bit easier.

But it's a real thing, people! The will of the majority doesn't just apply to electoral politics. If the group wants to go to Topless Tuesday or whatever, you risk ostracism if you stay home like a Grumpy Gus. But neither might you want to see a waitress whose job it is that night to (forgive my French) sit out with her tit out. So what's the remedy? Complain to the health department (in this specific case, the city council) and put a coercive kibosh on "unsanitary" food service.

Because human breasts have nothing whatsoever to do with nutrition. Egads.

But the meta-lesson here is that the game theory of euvoluntary exchange yields interesting results with more players, says I.

Euvoluntary Frugality

Exchanges are euvoluntary if they meet the six conditions. But what of the failure to exchange? Can frugality be euvoluntary?

There are trivial examples where failure to exchange could be tinged with regret or could amplify externalities. If I don't buy a crash helmet and I end up skidding on a patch of wet asphalt after a surprise downpour, my earlier decision to save a few bucks could end up costing me my ability to speak. If I scrimp on waste reclamation technology in my tannery, I might end up dumping toxic waste into the local watershed. That's not quite what I'm talking about though. I mean just ordinary spending. Is it euvoluntary to stay at home and eat a microwave burrito instead of patronizing Carlos and his taco truck even when you can clearly afford it?

There's a sort of theory in economics called the paradox of thrift. The way I understand it is like this: it might be individually wise to save for the future, but if everyone does it, it's contractionary, since consumer spending is such a large component of GDP. I say that it's "sort of" a theory, since it's predicated on the tendentious grounds that GDP is both a welfare metric and a policy end. Still, if it's right, it suggests that higher discount rates are normatively good, as reflected in growth statistics.

Then again, every dollar I spend on extra guacamole is possibly a dollar taken out of my daughter's college fund. Or out of my retirement plan. Are these any less euvoluntary than that burrito? Bounce savings decisions against the EE conditions. I can't easily pick out a violation. This suggests to me that most folks also don't sense a moral conflict.

So why do we have interest rate manipulation by central bankers?

Wait, what? What's the connection?

Okay, one way to think about interest rates is that they're prices. Specifically, the price of delaying consumption, or the price of borrowing. The price of waiting if you will. Low interest rates means that it's cheaper to borrow, more expensive to save. QE policies, whether through liquidity arguments or through interest rate arguments, are meant to tickle the here-and-now, to boost today's GDP figures. They suggest, if not outright declare that voluntary savings aren't truly voluntary. They aren't euvoluntary.

Are they right? Why or why not?

Virtue-Preserving Federalism

The Whitest Man on Earth ever so impishly guides my eyes to a Forbes piece of his from a few years back. In his tale, he buys ponchos cheap from dollar stores and sells them dear at sporting events.

Much like our ice truck yahoos or Adam Smith's sea merchant, Dubbers braves the maelstrom of uncertainty. Will it actually rain? Will he be able to move his entire inventory? Will the Crimson Tide roll far enough inland to justify snapping up more than one game's worth of ponchos?

Will university police throw him in an Alabama slammer for unlicensed sales?

There are two broad sorts of risk involved here: risks from nature and risks from man. Within each, we can find the finer taxonomies we're used to of risk, uncertainty, and non-ergodicity. There's not much anyone can do about the weather or the frequency of earthquakes or the likelihood of being swallowed by a sea serpent, but there is something we can do about our tolerance for the caprice of our legislators.

Anti-gouging laws, bans on genetic research, prohibitions against prostitution. These things prevent people from serving each other. Worse yet, the very notion that the scope of legislative power is broad enough to encompass virtually any activity that involves voluntary exchange between consenting adults chills the entrepreneur. From her perspective, it's bad enough that the ordinary risks of the market and the ever-shifting whims of her as-yet unidentified customers shake her confidence, so just imagine how much worse it is having to worry about whether or not the cops are going to upturn your stall, unplug your reefer and toss your tacos in the sewer. The threat of preemptive expropriation compounds upon fickle fortune in times when the simple dignity to try is subjugated in civil society.

But do we even need entrepreneurs? Do we need creative destruction? Innovation? Good question. I suppose we could be happy enough living in mud huts and plowing our subsistence farms by hand, but the fact that we see vanishingly few people actually doing this strikes me as reasonably good evidence that humanity cherishes those few of us who pack our bags for the hike out of Hobbes' jungle. It seems painfully obvious that the lot of humanity is advanced by the freedom to experiment, to search for the little ways we can find to strike mutually beneficial arrangements. Conversely, prosperity is retarded when the median constituent has granted political elites, either through inattention or active demands, the authority to meddle in private affairs.

If you don't want to buy what an entrepreneur is selling, that's great. Don't buy it. But that's no excuse to tolerate elected officials who have made it their business to go round smashing eggs in the nest before they even hatch. That's a great way to ensure the hens stop laying.

Entrepreneurship is far from euvoluntary. It's also the camshaft of economic growth. Its henhouse deserves to be free from the guardianship of elected foxes.

Strange Bedfellows

Wow.  What a complex set of issues.  Article on German attempt to restrict, or effectively outlaw, circumcision.

Some points occur to me.

1.  Why are we so concerned about preventing "back alley abortions" but not "back alley circumcisions"?  That is, one of the core arguments in favor of keeping abortion legal is that, regardless of the moral merits, people will get the operation anyway.  Along those lines, the German court in Cologne actually says, "the right of parents to raise their children in a religion does not override the right of a child to bodily integrity."  Really?  You can legally ABORT the child (presumably violating its bodily integrity pretty seriously), but you can't cut off a little fold of skin in an operation that two major religions have required for well over a thousand years? (More like three thousand for Jews).

2.  The medical evidence on (male) circumcision is mixed.  It is certainly not OBVIOUS that circumcision has no medical benefits. The only reason the practice is being singled out is that Jews and Muslims do it, and Germans find religion primitive and disgusting.  From the article:  “The often very aggressive prejudice against religion as backward, irrational and opposed to science is increasingly defining popular opinion,” said Michael Bongardt, a professor of ethics from Berlin’s Free University who added that the ruling reflected a profound lack of understanding in modern Germany for religious belief.  "Lack of understanding"?  I don't think so.  It is a rejection of personal autonomy so that Germans can construct the hive-state many of them secretly dream of.  Difference, disagreement, individual choices....come the revolution, we won't be needing no stinkin' "choices."  An Arab view (not THE Arab view, just one view)


3.  The article notes that there are 100,000 Jews and 4 million Muslims living in Germany.  Wow.


4.  On the other hand, contra my own views of private choice and personal autonomy for parents, what practices would be so harmful that I would change over and advocate state action?  Where is the line?  Female circumcision, for example:  That should be illegal, and aggressively prosecuted.  So what is my principle, here?  My own judgments?  Medical evidence?  If so, what is the presumption:  do we favor private choice, unless there is evidence it should be stopped?  Or start with thinking of what should be permitted?

Ye Olde Grabbing Hande

Over at The Freeman, Sheldon Richman takes on state intervention in voluntary exchange.

I think it's fair to say that it's possible that euvoluntary exchange can occur even in the presence of state intervention, but it's by no means guaranteed.

Trade War and the Euvoluntary Principle

Fighting a trade war is like going to a gunfight with an open breech. The state inevitably (and by "inevitably", I mean as a simple identity) harms its constituents as much it harms as the supposed opponent. Recall that by revealed preference, voluntary trade makes both parties to trade better off. Recall also that hostility is often met with hostility. When an administration bars Chinese tires from being shipped to the US, perhaps they ought not be too taken aback when China allegedly hoards rare earth minerals a few years later.

Now, this may not be Smoot-Hawley all over again, but it can be a reminder that unintended consequences are by no means unforeseeable consequences. In a rush to protect American consumers (?) from the devastating effects of inexpensive foreign tires, firms now find natural magnets more dear. Funny how that works.

Politicians and journalists like to talk about leveling the playing field. Pity that their bulldozer often ends up salting the earth.

Apologies for the godawful analogy.

I think the euvoluntary connection here is that moral intuitions about the value of trade just fly out the window when dealing with outsiders. If the median voter is distrustful of foreigners and elected officials seek an edge in the polls, then trade partners can make for an effectively voiceless scapegoat. Even when foreign trade is actually euvoluntary, it can be easy enough to make a man-of-straw case that it isn't.

In Morocco, Government Jobs are Allocated By....You Won't Believe It!

EE friend JR sends this email:

Talk about moral hazards - this NPR piece on government jobs in Morocco shows how students are rewarded for protesting by getting government jobs. They keep score and whoever does the most - extra points for clashes with the police - gets you hired by the government! They even have teams--and the gov hires people from the teams with the most points.

You can't make this stuff up...

Excerpt:

"I have a degree, a master's degree in English, and I'm here ... idle without a job, without dignity, without anything," protester Abdul Rahim Momneh says.

During the Arab uprisings over the past year, political grievances have received much of the attention. But youth unemployment is also a crisis for every Arab government. In Morocco, the jobless rate is more than 30 percent for young people.

Last week, five jobless college graduates set themselves on fire to protest unemployment. One has since been reported dead. Self-immolation has become something of a trend in the region ever since a young Tunisian street vendor set himself alight in December 2010, an event that sparked the uprising there and served as a catalyst for other revolts.

Government employment is hardly a solution for joblessness, say the movement's critics. Morocco's bureaucracy is already bloated and unproductive; the huge government payroll is a financial drain, they argue.

Yet, under pressure from these protests, officials often give in, adding a few more positions. Organizers hand the government a list of the most dedicated activists to choose from.
***********************
Now, is this a euvoluntary employment arrangement? The government hires the people who are most likely to hurt themselves most seriously. But to prove you are going to hurt yourself a lot, you actually have to do it.

It's not euvoluntary if I hold a gun to YOUR head. But is it euvoluntary if I hold a gun to MY head?

Interesting source piece: Kent Greenwalt

Kent Greenwalt wrote "Legal Enforcement of Morality," in A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, edited by Dennis Patterson,Wiley-Backwell, 2010.

Several interesting points about the role of information and an action being really voluntary....or not.  He says (p. 473):

One might even argue that choice in ignorance or under conditions when rational assessment is difficult is not really voluntary.  I shall not explore the problem of voluntariness further, but the more robust one conceives the conditions of voluntariness to be, the more one will accept state restrictions as countering undesirable choices that are not sufficiently voluntary. (Emphasis in original; clearly he was looking for the concept of "euvoluntary.")

As usual, the conditions under which exchange is euvoluntary match quite closely the conditions economists assume for perfect competition. Which is why perfect competition is a question-begging assumption.  On the other hand, the idea that the government has the correct information, and the incentives and capacity to make use of it, is no less question-begging.