p.s. from an East German propaganda booklet, published shortly before the building of the Berlin Wall (drawn from wikipedia):
“Both from the moral standpoint as well as in terms of the interests of the whole German nation, leaving the GDR is an act of political and moral backwardness and depravity. Those who let themselves be recruited objectively serve West German Reaction and militarism, whether they know it or not. Is it not despicable when for the sake of a few alluring job offers or other false promises about a ‘guaranteed future’ one leaves a country in which the seed for a new and more beautiful life is sprouting, and is already showing the first fruits, for the place that favours a new war and destruction? Is it not an act of political depravity when citizens, whether young people, workers, or members of the intelligentsia, leave and betray what our people have created through common labour in our republic to offer themselves to the American or British secret services or work for the West German factory owners, Junkers, or militarists? Does not leaving the land of progress for the morass of an historically outdated social order demonstrate political backwardness and blindness? … [W]orkers throughout Germany will demand punishment for those who today leave the German Democratic Republic, the strong bastion of the fight for peace, to serve the deadly enemy of the German people, the imperialists and militarists.”
This is the kind of rhetoric Rand no doubt heard in the wake of the Communist Revolution, and it gave her a deep mistrust of any form of coercion in human affairs. Capitalism, for her, was fundamentally non-coercive and voluntary – the baker doesn’t put a gun to my head and tell me to buy his bread (locking the door behind me, when I enter); nor does the customer put a gun to the head of the baker. It is a voluntary exchange. The factory owner does not put a gun to my head, telling me to work in his factory; nor do I put a gun to the head of the factory owner, telling him to hire me; nor does he put a gun to my head, telling me I can’t quit. Of course, there are other, more subtle forms of coercion – if I am starving, I *might as well *have a gun to my head, in terms of my need to accept, in exchange for back-breaking labor, a salary that is barely enough to subsist on. Rand believed that to speak of “force” or “coercion” in cases of unequal bargaining power was playing with words, and had no tolerance for metaphorical or de facto forms of coercion, since cases of actual coercion (the use of physical force, or the threat of physical force) were all-too-real and manifest.
