Obviously, the two categories just observed encompass only a small minority of American taxpayers. While the notion of a truly voluntary revenue system might, under other circumstances, be less utopian than it appears at first glance, the existing system is clearly based to a large extent on coercion. Tax-service officials may prefer to believe that they obtain voluntary compliance, much as the aforementioned rapist likes to imagine that his victim "enjoyed it," but both beliefs are detached from reality. Those who threaten force can at best obtain reluctant obedience; they cannot magically transform people's value scales or resultant supply and demand schedules to conform to their wishes. Praxeology does not pass moral judgment on the rapist or on the various forms of market intervention, but it must clearly differentiate such coercive actions from peaceful, free-market activity in order to trace their consequences.

Although attempts to manipulate the market through intervention are most characteristically associated with government, private parties also sometimes intervene into the market via the initiation of force. For example, sellers or groups of sellers of a good sometimes use violence or the threat of violence to attempt to deter customers from patronizing their competitors. In labor strikes, the threat of violence is sometimes used to prevent third parties from crossing a picket line. Such actions constitute interference with the free market and have consequences similar to governmental interference. Government may share some responsibility in these cases insofar as it chooses to overlook such instances of initiated force.