Ah the sound of stupidity
Don Marchildon ...
I will not attach a name to it either, but whatever it is, it did not work in the Garden of Eden, it did not work in the Soviet Union, it is not working in Europe and Canada and it surely will not work here.
Let's work to bring the cost of medical service down. Cost is the problem. ...
This was presumably in response to my letter ...
... Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama's health care plan resembles nothing like a nationalized government-run health care plan, instead opting to provide subsidies and tax benefits for individuals seeking insurance while simultaneously working with existing private health care providers to expand coverage and lower costs.
Of course, it is working in Europe and Canada, but again, damn those pesky facts.
I will not attach a name to it either, but whatever it is, it did not work in the Garden of Eden, it did not work in the Soviet Union, it is not working in Europe and Canada and it surely will not work here.
Let's work to bring the cost of medical service down. Cost is the problem. ...
This was presumably in response to my letter ...
... Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama's health care plan resembles nothing like a nationalized government-run health care plan, instead opting to provide subsidies and tax benefits for individuals seeking insurance while simultaneously working with existing private health care providers to expand coverage and lower costs.
Of course, it is working in Europe and Canada, but again, damn those pesky facts.
posted by Jmac at 2:18 PM
23 Comments:
"Medical care is grossly overpriced, probably because it is so heavily subsidized"
This guy's an idiot. So, having fewer subsidies would bring the price down?
Also, I know lot's of Europeans who wouldn't want to trade their very good healthcare systems for our lousy one. And, no, all the AMA and insurance company lies about no doctor choice and long lines are exactly that.
The argument goes that because a product is subsidized, that amount is included in the asked-for price as an assured thing. If the subsidy were to go away, natural market forces will push the price down to the real value. If the price is much higher than the market ordinarily will accept and whatever props up that price is removed, then the price drops to where the market will accept. The assumption, here, is that there is, in truth, a price for every product (whether for sale or not) that is really the price for that product distinct from the price that is actually circulated in the market. This assumption, generally speaking, is what makes people think that removal of subsidies will make prices fall to "reasonable" levels. However, the division of the market itself into two things, the real market and the actual market, show that this assumption is not only unwarranted, but an argument built within the fantasy.
I did not know, though, that the Garden of Eden had a healthcare plan put forward by a government. If the implicit claim is that the suggestion by the snake that eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil will make one as a god is the offer of healthcare by a representative of government, should we then assume that our present government is still that old serpent?
If you think health care is expensive now, just wait til it's free.
I love this. The same living wage liberals who think we can sustain an economy by paying workers more than they're worth think we can have a health care system that charges less than its costs.
From each, to each.
Reggie
"The same living wage liberals who think we can sustain an economy by paying workers more than they're worth think we can have a health care system that charges less than its costs"
No, they just think that having a healthcare system that only the rich have access to ain't right. We pay more in this country for worse healthcare than just about any other industrialized nation. A study about a year ago showed that the poorest 1/3rd of the population in Britain was still, on average, healthier than the wealthiest 1/3rd here because over there they have access to preventative care and so deal with illnesses before they become worse --an ounce of prevention being better than a pound of cure. We spend so much here because many people w/out insurance use the emergency room for their healthcare, which is about the most expensive way of providing care. Also, if we didn't have pharmaceutical companies vying to convince us we all need "the purple pill" or pills for "restless leg syndrome" and a bunch of other stuff they have invented to sell us pills, then they wouldn't have to have such large advertizing budgets and so could bring costs down. The reliance on private medicine here is what drives the cost up.
So instead of private pharma companies (who, like in all walks of life, are able to convince gullible people to buy things they don't really need; no use denying that), you want us to get rid of "private" medical providers and have medical costs provided by...who?
Is a central agency simply going to dictate what drugs should be developed? How do they decide? How do they know how many resources are worth the investment? You can't just wave a wand and develop a cure for everything; so how do we decide what to puruse and what not to? And how much of it to make? And if we don't make enough for everyone who needs it? (Whether it's a baldness remedy or a cure for cancer), then how do we decide who gets it?
The AMA contributes to our current health care problem. You'll get no argument from me there. Guilds (which is what the AMA is) hinder the free market; they conspire to arbitrarily force the required costs of going into their line of work up, so that fewer people can do it, so that those who can do it can demand a higher price and a better living. But that's not the problem that you (anonymous) are identifying with teh AMA. YOu're acting like it is the AMA who claims that socialized medicing leads to long waits, when that is simply not a disputed fact as far as I can tell (Michael Moore being a possible exception?). I took a biomedical ethics seminar in grad school at UGA, led by a strenuous feminist/liberal/environmentalis who supported universal health care, and in all the articles we read and all the discussion we had nobody disputed that when you go to that sort of system you end up with all the problems typically associated with "rationing." (A central authority that has monopoly control over a good but not enough of it to satisfy everyone, and so must somehow decide how to give it out. And, furthermore, by centralizing control over the resource you generally gurantee that it's supply will be less than what it was under the "free" conditions. So the central authority now has to divvy out less of the good than there was before they seized control of it.)
The typical argument from philosophically reflective socializers is that these problems are outweighed by the benefits of having a universal system. But nobody in their right mind denies that these problems exist.
And in any society, with any system of medical care (or any other system for distributing anything else), you can people who "like what they've got just fine" and people who are disgruntled. So we have to move beyond anecdotes of "what people in country X say about their system."
Charles (polus), I don't follow your argument. There is no "right" price or "reasonable" price for any good or service, under free market conditions. There is only the price it actually has at any given time under given circumstnaces. The idea that there is a "right" price for X is something various confused people say (some of those confused people being free market advocates themselves, admittedly), but it is not part of the theory offered by economists who argue against subsidies.
Subsidies by definition are the making more profitable of a certain line of production independently of any efficiencies (or lack thereof) in the line of production itself. In other words, if the government decides to give 100 dollars to every person who spends at least two hours in a day working on cars (and they get this money every day they do this), then working cars just became an avenue of production that profits 100 dollars a day, regardless of any other factors being taken into account. You could be good at it, bad at it. You could be producing great profit for the economy as a whole through your car-tinkering, or you might not. Etc. Either way, you get 100.
Thus, people in marginal lines of production--lines where the profitability is barely enough to stay afloat, will be highly 'tempted' to shift resources into car tinkering since that brings with it an "easy" 100 bucks a day no matter what. These decisions on the margins are how economies move, and the result is that "you get more of what you subsidize, and less of what you penalize."
If you pay people when they miss work for being sick, then people in your company will take more sick days than if you don't. I'm not saying it's a bad idea to pay them for being sick: I'm just pointing out the economic "fact." If you subsidize being sick, more people will be sick. Counterintuitive, perhaps; but not counterfactual. People who wake up in the morning feeling "on the margins" of being healthy enough to go to work, are going to tend to make one decision if they know they're not going to get paid if they stay home and another if they know they'll get paid anyway. Subsidies (and penalties) create decision-making pressures on people at the margins.
Everyone--rich or poor--has "access to preventive care." Everyone--rich or poor--can get their lazy asses off the couch and walk for an hour a day. I know. I've done it, and I've lost 50 pounds, lowered my blood pressure and cholesterol, and am told by my doctor that the only healthier people in Athens suit up Saturdays in Sanford Stadium.
That didn't cost one red cent in welfare money.
As far as what surveys say, I say screw that. Watch, instead, what people actually do. Americans aren't going to Europe and Canada for health care. To the contrary, Europeans and Canadians are coming here. That trumps any polling you can dredge up.
Reggie
Do you do your own dental work, Reggie? That's preventive care too.
"Americans aren't going to Europe and Canada for health care"
really? Last I heard bunches of Americans were going to Canada to buy prescription drugs. I had a friend for whom it was cheaper to fly to the UK and pay as a non-citizen to have her wisdom teeth out than it was to have it done here.
"To the contrary, Europeans and Canadians are coming here" Some may for high-level procedures (eg heart transplant) but no more than go to Europe for such --lots of people from around the world go to London to have their kids get specialized operations that it's too expensive for their own countries to provide the specialized facilities for (like separating conjoined twins)
As to data on the health of the average Brit versus that of the average American, these are verifiable data, not "opinion polls". But why let facts get in the way of your argument, right?
As to preventative care. Yes, people can take better care of themselves, and that helps in some regard --the best thing anyone can do is give up smoking/ not start smoking, for instance. But Hillary beat me to the punch in her response. Do you think all illness is simply the result of poor self-care of one's body?
Xon: "when that is simply not a disputed fact as far as I can tell"
Well, I suggest you do some more research, my friend. Here's a place to start --yes, it's by Krugman, but I'd suggest you look at what he says rather than who is saying it.
"A recent article in Business Week put it bluntly: “In reality, both data and anecdotes show that the American people are already waiting as long or longer than patients living with universal health-care systems.”
A cross-national survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund found that America ranks near the bottom among advanced countries in terms of how hard it is to get medical attention on short notice (although Canada was slightly worse), and that America is the worst place in the advanced world if you need care after hours or on a weekend.
We look better when it comes to seeing a specialist or receiving elective surgery. But Germany outperforms us even on those measures — and I suspect that France, which wasn’t included in the study, matches Germany’s performance.
Besides, not all medical delays are created equal. In Canada and Britain, delays are caused by doctors trying to devote limited medical resources to the most urgent cases. In the United States, they’re often caused by insurance companies trying to save money.
This can lead to ordeals like the one recently described by Mark Kleiman, a professor at U.C.L.A., who nearly died of cancer because his insurer kept delaying approval for a necessary biopsy. “It was only later,” writes Mr. Kleiman on his blog, “that I discovered why the insurance company was stalling; I had an option, which I didn’t know I had, to avoid all the approvals by going to ‘Tier II,’ which would have meant higher co-payments.”
He adds, “I don’t know how many people my insurance company waited to death that year, but I’m certain the number wasn’t zero.”
To be fair, Mr. Kleiman is only surmising that his insurance company risked his life in an attempt to get him to pay more of his treatment costs. But there’s no question that some Americans who seemingly have good insurance nonetheless die because insurers are trying to hold down their “medical losses” — the industry term for actually having to pay for care.
On the other hand, it’s true that Americans get hip replacements faster than Canadians. But there’s a funny thing about that example, which is used constantly as an argument for the superiority of private health insurance over a government-run system: the large majority of hip replacements in the United States are paid for by, um, Medicare.
That’s right: the hip-replacement gap is actually a comparison of two government health insurance systems. American Medicare has shorter waits than Canadian Medicare (yes, that’s what they call their system) because it has more lavish funding — end of story. The alleged virtues of private insurance have nothing to do with it.
The bottom line is that the opponents of universal health care appear to have run out of honest arguments. All they have left are fantasies: horror fiction about health care in other countries, and fairy tales about health care here in America."
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/opinion/16krugman.html?scp=1&sq=hip+krugman&st=nyt
As far as what surveys say, I say screw that. Watch, instead, what people actually do. ... That trumps any polling you can dredge up.
Because one person's anctedotal evidence is better than a comprehensive scientific analysis.
By the by, it's not 'polling' but statistical information.
"you want us to get rid of "private" medical providers"
PS: no, I don't want to get rid of private medicine; but I do at least want to have a system whereby people who are too poor to pay for medical care can still get it. I don't have a problem w/ a mixed private & public system. If you want to have cosmetic surgery, fine, go ahead and pay for it; but nobody should be denied cancer treatment because they can't afford it.
A link I found in less than a minute of looking. If the arguments Xon (as an example) loves to give about the marketplace creation of economic opportunities are accurate, the reason why medical tourism is growing as its own industry is because there is a demand for it which these businesses satisfy. Namely, people wishing to save money by traveling outside of the United States to receive medical care that is comparable to what they could expect in the United States. If the claim is that this cheaper medical care is of less quality than what one finds in the United States, and therefore is the reason why it has a lesser price, we are still faced with this assumption that, a priori, health care in the United States is better. And we know that it is better because it is sold at a much higher price. But, this argument also tends to be advanced alongside such claims as the one that started this discussion: United States health care is overpriced. This is a structural inconsistency in the argument, since the inferences lead to the conclusion that, perhaps, the quality of health care in the United States is not properly connected to the price it demands.
Xon, I apologize for any confusion I caused you. However, I see that you repeat the same line of argument that Marchildon does. That is, you also argue that subsidies are causing people to accept a certain market exchange by creating value in something without there being any change in the product itself as item of production (there is, however, definitely a change in the item itself as a result of the change in its value for the subject). But Marchildon argues this because he thinks that removing the subsidies will reduce the prices of health care, whereas you simply argue for what a subsidy is, as though I didn't know. The catch in your story is just that there is no "right" or "reasonable" price in free market conditions, but clearly where the government subsidizes something is not operating in those conditions. That is my point: despite the detail of what should happen in a "free market," the marketplace itself can only be taken as if it is free. The subsidy, as you point out, makes it actually more profitable to engage in some activity or exchange, when Marchildon's claim is that this profitability created through subsidy acts contrary to what would happen in the free market. If you want to say that Marchildon is just a naive economist, feel free.
Nevertheless, the structure of your argument suggests to me that you accept government involvement occurring in the marketplace as conforming to the same principles which define a "free market." In which case, I'd have to ask if your concern with government involvement in the marketplace is, and has always been, a moral one, rather than a purely economic one. In other words, there isn't really such a thing as a free market, since what is heralded as the good within the marketplace (its utilization of supply-demand exchange to produce, reflexively, better efficiencies; its tendencies towards more even and more efficient distributions of goods among desires; such and so on) already incorporates the activity of a government or a state as just another participant, structurally indistinguishable from any other participant. But then what does distinguish the state for you? Its guns, its soldiers, its use of force to manipulate exchange, or something else substantial and distinct about the government?
It may be that governments' interferences in economic exchange are inefficient, and you prefer to argue they are inefficient by definition, but the selection of an inefficient means of distribution has no moral value from the perspective of economics. Unless, that is, you think there is some moral duty for subjects to choose the most efficient means of distributing goods. Perhaps you are performing that grand reductio using the moral utilitarianism of those whom Reggie calls the "living wage liberals" to show that even on their own standard universal (and centralized) health care fails, but the internal consistency of your position of economics as essentially an uninterested mathematical evaluation of valuation and its relationship to acts and choices of subjects suggests the futility of this kind of argument. If people choose and pay for an inefficient system, then all economics as such has to say on the decision is that it was made in concert with the principles of economics. Something of a tautology, because trivial.
And, as an aside, you should know better than to cite our bioethics class as an example of the acceptance of universal health care advocates on the matter of the reduced qualities of a state organizing and managing health care. While many contemporary liberals accept the standard capitalistic view of life as the managing of the distribution of goods, the view that was the de facto position in that class, that is not necessarily a view accepted by all people who wish to have universal health care access. Your own equation of universal health care with centralization is unwarranted, but it seems to be the strongest tack you take. You know that not every liberal is a leftists, that not all leftists believe and accept central authorities, and that not all liberals believe and accept central authority.
Besides all of this long wall of text, I want to point out in Reggie's comment that he acknowledges that he has access to preventive care--care that evidently has the oversight of a doctor who approves of how he's exercised and made himself almost as healthy as the CSC staff and the physical plant grounds crew at Sanford Stadium. I think the point is self-defeating, though charitable to everyone in believing them all capable of practicing healthy living.
No, I don't think all illness is the result of a failure to take care of one's self, any more than I think it's lack of dental care that is the cause of our health care "crisis."
But one can choose to be proactive. Or not. Too many people opt for the latter, then want someone to confiscate someone else's money to bail them out.
Thievery, pure and simple.
Reggie
Reggie, do you accept car insurance?
"Thievery, pure and simple"
Reggie: I sure do hope you don't get cancer or some other major disease through no fault of your own!
But even if someone has private insurance, they're still not covering the full cost of any care they might have --that is, after all, the point of insurance, no? If that's the case, aren't they simply engaging in "Thievery, pure and simple" by effectively "stealing" from those who pay their private health insurance premiums but never claim anything on them because they're never sick (through their own good self-management or through luck)? In order for you to be consistent in your claims that those who are supported by the payments of others are engaging in thievery(essentially your claim re tax-payer-funded universal healthcare), then surely you'd also be against private insurance schemes for the above reason, right? Am I to take it that you don't, therefore, believe in private insurance? Should we just all individually pay the cost of our own healthcare?
Reggie wins! If only on the basis of brevity and clarity. If you have to use 10 paragraphs to explain your argument, you have too much time on your hands and should probably be out exercising or flossing your teeth.
We will have 'universal' care in this country soon, and I just hope you liberals can remember what it was like now, and honestly let us know then if it is better. But, more than likely, you'll just say that the conservatives messed it up and we need to throw more money at the problem.
Good night, Irene
"If you have to use 10 paragraphs to explain your argument"
That's right, because a short yet wrong argument is SO much better! Isn't that what got us into this mess in Iraq --or was I just not paying attention that day?
I'm not sure I understand the question. Do I "accept" car insurance?
I certainly pay it, and I understand the premise.
Reggie
To the one anonymous, I'm sorry for writing more than you'd prefer. Xon and I have this... thing about arguing our points that goes way back. Brothers and iron, as the biblical proverb goes.
Reggie, not to be in "gotcha mode," but a sincere sort of a question. What are the key differences for you between universal health care and car insurance?
Charles, I'm finishing up my dissertation (yea! yea!), so I can't go into a big long thing here, though I always enjoy doing so with you. Forgive me.
Quickly, I don't know who that long M-name economist you referenced is. I'm not saying he's naive; what I am saying (or what I should have said) is that "free market" economics is ambiguous in its own right, because there are several schools that advocate a free market but which define it rather differently. Many of the "gotcha" arguments against free markets are usually working with a narrower range of possible understandings of what the free market even is, and most ignore the Austrian school's definition altogether.
This, for one quick example, is why we get a lot of progressives arguing that "free market" economics is akin to fascism or corproatism, which of course on an Austrian definition is self-contradictory. Austrians oppose fascism more strongly than most progressives, in the sense that Austrians claim to understand better than progressives that any and all state intervention in the voluntary exchanges of the populace, even when those interventions seem to be aiming at a moral good, can lead to disaster. Furthermore, Austrians have claimed always that some of the biggest opponents of genuine free markets are the business class, the rich, etc. People love to use the power and influence they already have to maintain said power and influence by manipulating markets through force (or partnership with those with force). Austrians oppose this sort of thing consistently, always have. To them the free market they are striving for is a system of economic exchange that is absent these sorts of corruptions just as much as the "communist" kinds of corruptions (where means of production are seized altogether and a central state does all the planning without any sort of assistance from an ostensibly 'private' sector). But today a lot of people--and when I thought of "naive" free marketeers I was really thinking more of people like Limbaugh and other conservative blowhards--associate the "free market" with "Wall Street getting rich," or something like that. Not necessarily.
As to liberals, leftists, and centralists, I do realize that those do not all overlap tightly. But that's really not my concern. If I sinned against a brother by using a shorthand label, then let me bring my sacrifice to the altar now by explaining what I mean. I don't care what you call them: my concern is with those who advocate coercive centralized control of the distribution of economic resources. You already know what my primary objection to gubmint interference is, and you hinted at it in your comment: governments are inherently coercive. Now, I am actually not a philosophical libertarian. I don't think that coersion is necessarily bad. But I think we have to call a spade a spade, and recognize that any time we advocate a government-run solution to anything we are advocating forcing some people to do that which they would not choose to do otherwise. We need to think very carefully about that, and about what the circumstances are when we are willing to accept that sort of thing. Today in public discourse, the gov't is just bandied about as the great solver of all problems, and nobody (except "cranks" who, as soon as they say what I am saying, are marginalized as 'libertarians') looks at the moral flip side. I'm not saying that moral flip side is nuclear: killing all signs of moral life and rendering government solutions unacceptable for 10,000 years. But it is real; it can be overcome or defeated by other considerations, but that is a conversation that actually has to be had, and modern folks are in the most stubborn habit of not having it.
So, what I don't like is coercive manipulation of people's voluntary mutual exchanges regarding (almost anything) health care. That's what I'm against. I don't care what you call the people who advocate it. If there are liberals and leftists who do not like centralized control (i.e, Marxist anarchists, which there certainly are), then my beef is not with them on this topic. Because, of course, those kinds of people don't advocate universal health care programs either, do they?
If a confederation of churches provides ministry to the body (the Church), is this universal and decentralized? I am not clear on why you equate universality with centrality. Perhaps I am using the word 'universal' improperly, and most everyone else means by it this central authority you stand opposed to.
Marchildon, that long M-name, is the person who wrote the letter that Johnathan is responding to in this post. It was Marchildon's position that I was reconstructing initially, and is the one I present as being formed in a fantasy of the market. My arguments are always contextual, you know this.
Perhaps I need to read more from the Austrian school, but it seems to me that the a priori argument that grounds economic exchange in subjectivity and treats the activity of valuation as the strongest source of motivation has to assume some kind of metaphysical or ontological difference for "government" that is plainly inapplicable by its own formal argument. You had said that the Austrians also argue against the powerful and the influential manipulating the marketplace, and that these kinds of manipulations are corruptions of the free market. The government, being inherently coercive, is in this respect not different in its practice from the powerful and the influential (the rich, business class, or whatever you had in mind), since all these corrupt what had been a more pure form of economic exchange.
But is there ever a pure form of exchange? Is this not itself a fantasy of the same kind as the Rawls one we lambasted in that same class? What moral framework does one use in a theory of economics to decide that one person's subjectivity is more corrupting because more influential? At what point, or in what manner, does manipulation become an evil to be resisted if the natural or pure form of the market includes fluctuation in price as a result of the production and the awareness of the efficiency of that production? Hence, is advertising necessarily an evil to the Austrian?
From your argument, it seems to me that your problem cannot be with just "government-run" solutions--any solution that is suggested which involves a forcing of the issue becomes a bad solution, regardless of the political status of the solvent. The rich are not the government, nor are the business class, are they? But certainly you do leave open the door for persuasion, and you don't deny that false consciousness persists, so that suggests to me that the kind of force you're thinking about it material force: guns, swords, threats. But what about, say, the sit-ins, the boycotts, the picket lines of the Civil Rights era--apart from whatever views you may hold about the Civil Rights Act?
Charles,
I think you offer valid criticisms of Austrianism, and a number of them I have offered myself. Further, not to pull any punches, I think these sorts of criticisms might very well devastate the entire axiomatic system of the Austrians. But, as a Christian, I don't look for systems that can stand on their own, but only to plunder the Egyptians of whatever good ideas they seem to have. Often God makes implausible notions stand in ways different than their authors intended.
(Also, interestingly enough, in questioning the inherent, a priori, subjectivity of Austrianism, you are in the same boat as the Rushdoonyites and Christian Reconstructionists like Gary North (which I'm sure you're REALLY GLAD to hear!), who have always questioned Misesian and Rothbardian (the two Austrians par excellence, even moreso than Hayek) orthodoxy on this matter. As North says he once said to Mises in person: It is objectively better to be healthy and rich than to be sick and poor. To which, North says, Mises agreed despite his theory to the contrary. Anyway, anecdotes are fun...)
Anyone who is advocating universal health care in the sense of "everyone is covered," but does not advocate coersive government manipulation of the market to get there, is someone I have no beef with. I admit, I DO associate the two, becuase that is how public discourse on the matter goes. I've never heard or read anything that amounted to "universal" health care that wasn't built on the back of centralized coersion. Maybe this is just an indictment of my reading habits; maybe I don't get out enough. But I'm not aware of anyone offering such a plan.
In this sense, I will give credit where credit is due and say that Obama's plan is much better than Hillary's, if for no other reason than that it does not SEEM to involve the same level of centralized coersion as Hillary's plan. However, it could also be said that Obama's plan is not one for "universal" health care, couldn't it? After all, isn't Obama's thing (JMac, send me a link to his full plan, would you? E-mail it to me.) that he wants to "work together" with all the different players in our current system to find ways to make it more affordable. In other words, it sounds like he's not advocating a top-down effort to simply provide everyone with health care. Of course, all government schemes necessarily involve coersion (unless the scheme is "close down the department, fire the bureaucrats, and burn all records that it every existed," though even here the act of dismantling can only be done with tax dollars that have been appropriated from the citizens). So I'm not saying that Obama is okey-dokey for free market advocates. But he does seem a good step better than Hillary. (Or maybe that's just the audacity of my own hope talking, since I think Obama will be our next president whether I like it or not)
But yes, the fundamental point of the Austrian criticism of government is both moral and economic in nature. (And the oddity of this has been pointed out by many within the school: How does one launch a moral criticism of government intervention from a system of economic analysis that takes all valuations as inherently subjective. What if the people want a coersive system, etc.? Guys like Rothbard and Hans Herman-Hoppe have tried to "solve" this. I'm not familiar with the details of their arguments, though). In any case, it is morally wrong to take people's stuff (that's the moral argument). It is an assualt against a person's life and property of exactly the same sort that the social contract philosophers said government is supposed to protect its citizens against. But in economic intervention the government becomes the assaulter.
Aside from the moral problem, though, there is also an economic problem of efficiency. The Austrian argument hinges on the idea that the most efficient arrangement of resources is that which arises under free (i.e., mutually voluntary) exchange conditions. If every person is legally able to dispose of their own (legitimately acquired) property as they think best, in accordance with their own subjective valuations of what is most important, then the result will be an economy in which available resources are put towards their most important uses (as subjectively determined by the people at large). This doesn't mean everyone will be happy and content necessarily, because the scarcity of economic resources is always a buggerbear that limits how many of our subjective values can actually be fulfilled at any given time. Sometimes there will be times of greater (relative) scarcity. There is on magical way to prevent that, free market or otherwise. So, for instance, if a tsunami wipes out the entire east coast of the U.S. ten miles in in ten minutes, then there is going to be a time or relative hardship. But that time will be best navigated if free market conditions continue to hold: if people are able to deal with the hardship in the same way they made exchanges before it struck; by voluntarily exchanging their legitimately-acquired property with others as they think best. Most Austrian argumentation is aimed at establishing this view, that "free" exchange is optimal as far as efficient resource distribution is concerned.
Then, once that is established, the Austrians move on to point out that government intevention is always (necessarily) a corruption of this free exchange (B/c it isn't free, by definition). Thus, government intervention always leads to inefficiencies that would not be present if the intervention hadn't happened. Thus, government intervention is a bad idea, economically.
Of course, this hints (I think) at the way in which the moral and the economic coalesce. If the economic argument against government intervention is really true, then intervention is also immoral, assuming a person holds to a moral doctrine in which it is bad for people to suffer and good for them to prosper. On such a doctrine, then to tinker economically is to harm people, which is (presumably) immoral.
But as for coersion: the Austrians are strict libertarians on this, in the spirit of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer and Robert Nozick. The only coersion that is genuinely coersion is physical assualt on a perosn's life, liberty, or property. Simply having some sort of psychological influence (as through advertising) doesn't count. "Spiritual" or "emotional" assaults don't count (thus why libertarians don't advocate making something like adultery a crime. Surely adultery causes harm in a good number of cases, just ask the spouse who is cheated on and the children whose world is shattered when their family disintegrates. But this is not a "physical" harm on the children, the libertarians say, and thus it doesn't count for anything, legally-politically).
That's the Austrian view of coersion, anyway. To them, the notion is front-loaded with physicality in such a way that I don't think your objection about "influence" would really register with them. The kind of influence they object to is actual physical interruptions of people's own chosen path, whether by mugging them on the street, burning their house down, or getting a politician to pass a law which has the same effect. (And this is what I had in mind when I talked about the rich or the business class interfering in the market: I meant that they themselves often advocate that coersive measures be used against their competitors. They conspire with government to establish a firmer (less competitive) position for themselves in the economy.)
In other words, Austrians assume (and Mises argues extensively for this in his Theory of Human Action, fwiw) that human beings are "free" in the libertarian sense, that they have sufficient control over the course of their life, even when bombarded by subliminal suggestions and advertisements and the like, to be responsible for the path they take.
All of this is probably a myth, of course. So, do with that what you will. :-)
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