Bargaining power is limited both by competition for jobs, and by fundamental necessity, which was more my point. A group of workers who do not have the freedom

Bargaining power is limited both by competition for jobs, and by fundamental necessity, which was more my point. A group of workers who do not have the freedom to engage in competitive tender, because they are forced to address their fundamental needs, are in a much worse bargaining position irrespective of whether or not they have "skills to offer to society". The wider point is that structure matters: an organisation that is run dictatorially by a small central group is, by my estimation, fundamentally more illiberal than an organisation that is run cooperatively by its members. I fail to understand why those people who are enamoured with free market principles are such staunch defenders of organisations that internally suppress those principles almost absolutely. I am skeptical of the limited definition of coercion as only persuasion that takes place by force or threat; in my opinion there are many other, more 'polite' ways of influencing people that are just as pernicious. Indeed, I agree with both pyoung and DerpDerpDerp that your craigslist exchange was coercive in the sense that you exploited that person's situation to your own advantage. A basic test for whether or not an exchange is non-coercive is whether or not both parties would happily reverse the exchange. If not, then there was probably some element of coercion involved, even if it was simply an unaddressed asymmetry of information. Remember that perfect market information is one of the assumptions necessary for market Pareto optimality.