What can a human “do?”
What can a human “do” in the world to survive, without coercion or force to other humans?
- Live off of nature without participating in society,
- Beg (e.g. homeless people),
- Contract his/her labor to an entrepreneur,
- Without making any moral judgments on government jobs, a job directly or indirectly paid for by a government does not meet “without coercion or force,” as the resources required to sustain that job are taken through coercion and force.
- Entrepreneurship:
- Create a product, at profit, that did not exist before, which will be demanded,
- Create a product, at profit, in a different way (more cheaply, better, marketable, etc.) from an existing product, winning away demand,
- Acquire capital (with an above method or through homesteading) and make investments which have a positive rate of return (e.g. what an apartment building owner does).
A pastor or a non-profit, for example, are not beggars (#2) but are actually entrepreneurs (#4), voluntarily receiving capital through donations and fulfilling the needs of their funders [Rothbard].
Without coercion or force, options #3 through #6 require voluntary cooperation with other humans, and a human will only attain enough to survive if both sides of the cooperation feel a gain in subjective value — i.e. a human gets enough to survive when society (i.e. other humans who would provide him/her food, housing, etc.) judge, through each exchange, his/her participation in society to be productive and valuable.
Optimally, overall labor decreases while entrepreneurship increases.
When there is no central planning government, entrepreneurship “directs” society (in so much as society directly decides which entrepreneurs succeed and fail by “voting” with their purchases) in what, where, why, and how things are done.
In summary, for options #3 through #6, a human must be productive from the point of view of other humans in society.