> It very much does if it involves limiting what terms employers and employees can agree to

You don't really need to do this if you provide a strong welfare state. Provide government healthcare and benefits to all citizens equivalent to say $10 an hour, and you don't need to limit how employers and employees interact. They have the freedom to quit.

> And it certainly requires oppression

So we come back to the beginning: all taxation is oppression?

Keep in mind that my scheme actually probably involves less government force than yours. People will be less violent, requiring less respondent force, if given a minimum standard of living. So do you want the government to use more force? Or is "oppression" the issue, I can't keep up.

> You don't really need to do this if you provide a strong welfare state

Why is providing a welfare state a prerequisite here? From where do you derive the need to protect people from the total consequences of their failure or misfortune by forcing the collective to bear the burden?

> all taxation is oppression?

Of course it is - it's robbery. Just like the draft is slavery. The important question is "What circumstances make it ethical to rob/enslave people?". They do exist, but they are quite limited.

> do you want the government to use more force

It's not about degrees of force, it's about what situations force is applied to. The only acceptable application of force (read violation of liberty) is to defend liberty itself from imminent danger. Applying any degree of force to compel cooperation is indistinguishable from that degree of slavery. What's the problem with strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual interaction between people?

> From where do you derive the need to protect people from the total consequences of their failure or misfortune by forcing the collective to bear the burden?

I'll answer this with a question: you said elsewhere that its unethical to compel doctors to treat a patient. Let's assume that's the case. What happens when you are robbed by someone, shot, and your wallet is stolen, you even pass out from the shock and blood loss.

A bystander calls an ambulance. Then what? The ambulance service, the hospital (and the doctor) have no idea if you can pay for their services. Let's assume you can, you have fantastic insurance. What is the right way to resolve this situation? It seems to me your answer is that the hospital should have every right to refuse to serve people without identification (and in fact this is probably in the hospitals best interest, from a pure ROI perspective).

So do we throw our hands in the air and let some people who, by any account, don't deserve to die (they're insured, if their wallet wasn't stolen, there'd be no issue at all!) through no fault of their own, or do we protect people from the total consequence of their misfortune by providing some kind of guardrail?

A more general answer is that people, in aggregate, don't like the instability that comes from a lack of welfare state. If you provide absolutely no welfare state, and I lose my job and can't find a new one, it is very likely that the best thing for me to do is to steal from someone. And people generally speaking dislike that because unlike robbery from the government, which involves paperwork and court rooms, that kind of robbery really actually involves guns. And people seem to find suits and paperwork to be less force than guns.

So you pick your poison: a democratically controlled nonviolent robbery that you can influence and plan for, or a stochastic violent robbery that you can't control at all. Personally, I find paperwork to be less violent than a gun, but you have weird ideas about what constitutes violence, so I'm curious what you'll say.

> What's the problem with strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual interaction between people?

It doesn't exist. Is coercion voluntary? If it's violent to threaten someone's life by holding a gun to their head, why isn't it violent to withholding food they need to live (or the money they need to buy the food they need to live, or the healthcare they need to live, or the money they need for that healthcare)?

> What happens when you are robbed by someone, shot, and your wallet is stolen, you even pass out from the shock and blood loss.

You are at this point reliant on the charity (read: voluntary) of others. Even if you were identified and your insurance accepted, the paramedics or doctors can just refuse to do their jobs, for whatever reason, and face only professional consequences. You are in no way guaranteed to be treated.

Also, the insured could demand coverage for this case from their providers, with liability to their estate if they are not treated. This would force insurers to negotiate with hospitals to treat these patients rather than incur the liability.

> don't deserve to die

What do you mean "don't deserve?". If you're laying shot in the street, then clearly you're going to die soon without lots of outside intervention. This is your lot. Insurance isn't there to provide a guarantee of some outcome, it's there to reimburse as best it can after the fact.

> don't like the instability that comes from a lack of welfare state

Doing what "people like" isn't the same as being ethical.

> the best thing for me to do is to steal from someone

That depends on the risk/reward balance between stealing and figuring out how to be productive. If the punishment for robbery is severe, then chances are you'll figure out how to be useful to someone before resorting to it.

> Is coercion voluntary

Yes? If your grandmother offers you a cup of tea, insists, and will be offended if you don't take it, does that make it involuntary? She's clearly coercing you.

> why isn't it violent to withholding food they need to live

Everyone needs inputs to live, and everyone is born without the means to provide them for themselves. Therefore everyone must, at some point, enter into a negotiation with those who possess what they need. Absent any law and order, these negotiations often turn violent. All we've any right to do is make some rules around the negotiations, not prescribe universal cooperation.

> This would force insurers to negotiate with hospitals to treat these patients rather than incur the liability.

The ROI here functionally never makes sense for the insurer to do this, unless clients are paying enough to offset the cost of paying all unidentified people.

> You are in no way guaranteed to be treated.

Are you saying that this is the case today, or that this is how it would be. Because I agree with you. Despite laws that require doctors to treat you that exist today (to prevent this exact scenario), no one ever holds a gun to anyone's head. There's no need for violence. Professional (and in general civil) consequences are enough to enforce this.

> She's clearly coercing you.

Coercion requires force or threat. From me shooting you is the same as the harm from me starving you, so the threat is the same. A grandmother being upset isn't a threat, and certainly not the same level of threat, not is it force. So perhaps let's ask a different question: is choice freely given when your life is threatened?

> Doing what "people like" isn't the same as being ethical.

Utilitarians would disagree with you.

The root problem with how you approach the world is that you see any government force as worse than all force by everyone else. Like given how your approach contacts, if I coerced you to sign yourself into slavery, that's acceptable, since it meets your definition of "strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual".

If you believe government is the worse bad and nothing else can be as bad, sure that's a viewpoint. But it fails when you have other powerful organizations that hold the same power over an individual as a government does.

Imagine for a moment another extreme example where the government has a total use of force monopoly, and I have a monopoly on the water supply. You say that is unethical for the government to act against me, and also unethical for individuals to act against me, no matter what. This is true even if I use that Monopoly to enslave people or commit genocide, because I'm doing it without violence, only coercion. If that's your ethics, something's broken.

And pragmatically it's also stupid: people will lose faith in a government that fails to protect them. So a government that fails to protect its citizenship effectively will quickly cease to exist (the people with guns will desert to protect their families and tada: a new government). So once you accept that democracy is ethically good (and really even if you don't), the ethics are irrelevant. Governments must keep people happy or they will quickly cease to exist. And I subscribe to the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does. Governments try to make their citizens happy. If they don't, they'll be replaced by one which does, because that's what the people want. Your job is then to convince me, and everyone else's that sacrificing my safety is worth a government that is in your view more ethical.