Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast, Monday, July 9th.

This is Anastasia Yuglova.

Two months ago, Cato's online magazine Cato Unbound

tackled the debate over the place of liberty in economic theory.

I caught up with one of the participants in that issue,

distinguished University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein. In this

phone conversation I pick his brain on coercion, the state, and the minimum wage.

We're dealing with a fairly esoteric topic here.

It's the tension between voluntary and course of action

as regards economic policy.

So just to frame the topic, then,

how do you define coercion?

Well, that's a very fair question, and I think there are two definitions that you could start to think of.

One definition, which I think we ought to reject is overbroad is that which says that coercion is any action

taken by an economic act which harms the economic interests of another individual.

That may sound good to many people because it's kind of reminiscent of the old million harm principle,

which is that the only reason that the state may act is to prevent the harm that one individual commits to another.

But on the other hand, this definition of home is so broad

that what it does is it covers ordinary competition as well as

thudgery and that confusion between the competition and the thudgery

is what leads people I think very sadly astray.

So that what what has to do in effect is to narrow this idea of the harm principle and to say that coercion involves the threat of the use of force by which we mean it in the

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