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Here you are suddenly using a different criterion for coercion.

Compulsion could lie either in the raising a child to become a consumer or in the lack of intellectual maturity, but presumably not in both. (It actually lies in forcing anything onto the child, be that becoming a consumer or something else.)

School violates several enlightenment values, including freedom of association and the right to bodily autonomy.

Advocating compulsory schooling for the sake of enlightenment makes no sense.

Whether school is compulsory does not depend on whether you as a teacher dislike the curriculum, but on whether the student is forced to go to school.

It was only in the 2000s that school became a compulsory program, as the teaching of skills was geared to the needs of the market rather than to enlightenment values and independent thinking.

(Kant)

Exams are not an example of freedom of choice. On the contrary: they are an instrument of oppression.

That's not a real choice. For example, I had to choose between French and Latin, but I didn't have the choice to do neither and create a new alternative.

Compulsory schooling itself violates freedom of choice, as the student does not have the choice to stay at home and do something else with his time instead.

Freedom of choice is not restricted at school. For example, students can choose between different languages. They can choose their exams and what to read, etc.

(Kant)

Although you can't force someone to think, you can create the conditions for them to force themselves to think.

That's exactly what school does.

Superseded by #41. This comment was generated automatically.

So children already have freedom of thought? You originally said (#34) that children only have freedom of thought when their minds have reached a certain level of maturity; that this was the purpose of school in the first place. That doesn't fit together.

Expecting a child to keep his freedom of thought in the face of all that pressure is not realistic.

So children already have freedom of thought? You originally said that children only have freedom of thought when their minds have reached a certain level of maturity; that this was the purpose of school in the first place. That doesn't fit together.

Forcing someone to think is impossible. The student remains free in his thoughts.

(Kant)

If freedom of choice is sufficiently restricted, freedom of thought is also restricted.

Anyone who is forced to spend hours every day dealing with topics they would otherwise not deal with has neither freedom of choice nor freedom of thought.

We need to distinguish between freedom of choice and freedom of thought.

School serves to educate students to have freedom of thought. This is achieved by restricting freedom of choice.

(Kant)

That is not what freedom means.

Freedom does not consist in the guarantee of certain thoughts or scope for action.

Roughly speaking, freedom is when you are left alone by others when you want to be left alone.

If you are sent to school against your will, you are not free. School is a forced program.

Forcing children to be free is a contradiction in terms.

Freedom is achieved when the mind reaches a certain level of intellectual maturity: when it thinks for itself.

This is the purpose of compulsory education: to liberate children.

(Kant)

CrowBot99 writes:

In order for a military and police to be valid, it would need the consent of the governed […], but a hidden qualification is MOST of the governed, which is an exception to individual right of association.

And:

[Rand’s] conclusion, in essence, is that an individuals [sic] right to choose who defends them should be ignored for the sake of a collective good, which seems to me an exception to one of our shared principles.

Dispute resolution, lawmaking, and personal defense are only proper in the hands of government.

It doesn’t. Not any more than it creates man’s rights. Whether an interaction is consensual is derived from the nature of the interaction itself.

Government creates consent. Without government, there is no consent.

Taken to its logical conclusion, Rand’s argument necessitates a single world government, which doesn’t fit with the objectivist notion that government should be limited.

In anticipation of this problem, different protection agencies would develop such rules and procedures, which could be publicly accessible for their customers to peruse.

Solving this problem is one of the main value propositions these agencies have to offer. Without a solution, people won’t give them money. So these agencies have an incentive to put their heads together and come up with common standards.

For novel situations where they don’t have an applicable standard yet, see the myth of the framework (#16).

KodoKB writes:

[…] I disagree that international law and agreements are such a shining example for having anarchy on a local scale. The defense of my rights from someone who lives in my neighborhood shouldn’t rely on the extradition agreements between our two protection agencies, there should be clearly established rules about how what rights of action we have and don’t have, and it should be clearly established how we can resolve disputes about those issues. And if my neighbors all have different agencies, then it cannot be practically clear to me what all of those actions and resolutions are.

Governments do wage wars against each other, but private arbitration services would be less inclined to do so because, unlike governments, they do not have an effectively infinite amount of extorted money (taxes), fiat money, and human lives to draw from.