People who object to not-euvoluntary transactions persist in their opposition even after being shown the ban makes the worst-off party worse off, because their real objection is preferring not to live in a world where such things are monetized—it functions as a preference, not a factual error.

Economists' standing assumption behind 'voluntary' is a background context of enforceable property rights; without them, even a wallet handed over at gunpoint could be called voluntary, so euvoluntary exchange must rule out the gun-and-wallet case.

The man in China sold his kidney for about $3,000 to buy an iPad and a laptop, illustrating a real not-euvoluntary organ sale.

In the snowy-ditch example, a helper who pushes out a stranded car voluntarily will often angrily refuse offered money regardless of the amount or either party's income, because the helper's deal was to do the right thing—not to be tipped—showing the monetary aspect itself is what's objected to.

People objected to the Raleigh ice sellers and clapped at their arrest not out of confusion about getting ice, but because they did not want to live in a world where people can profit from exploiting others' misfortune.

The euvoluntary framework may be analyzing the contents of an empty box because there are essentially no perfectly euvoluntary exchanges, but the ideal type is still useful for understanding people's reactions and diagnosing which non-euvoluntary transactions should be allowed.

Some of these beer cellars in Germany have operated continuously since the 14th century.

American beer festival attendees in Germany sing cheesy American songs rather than German songs, which is a sign of cultural homogenization.

Many transactions are legal to give away for free but illegal to sell, and the only purpose of such laws is to prevent the good from being exchanged for its market value (e.g., ice during a shortage, blackmail information, kidneys).

Euvoluntary (truly voluntary) exchange is always just; therefore the state would never have an excuse to regulate it, which means all existing regulation and moral intuition about exchange must rest on the claim that those transactions are 'not really voluntary.'

Blackmail reveals that the law objects not to the exchange of information itself (which is legal and may even be admirable) but specifically to charging money for it; the act of monetizing the threat is what makes it repulsive and illegal.

It is legal to donate a kidney but illegal to sell it; because the sale is banned, mutually beneficial transactions (e.g., a million-dollar payment from a desperate buyer to a financially desperate seller) do not occur, leaving both parties worse off.

For an exchange to be euvoluntary it must satisfy: common-law contract conditions (age, competence, full information/no fraud, conventions of ownership and transfer), no later regret (no time-inconsistency or compulsion), no externalities affecting non-consenting parties, and no duress or force.

The decisive condition for euvoluntariness is that the disparity in BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) between the parties must not be too great; when one party's next-best alternative is catastrophic (e.g., death of thirst) while the other's is trivial, the transaction is not euvoluntary even though both parties may gain.

The 'no later regret' condition is effectively a rational-expectations requirement: an exchange is only euvoluntary if the actor is so fully informed that they will not regret it later, which is undermined by addiction, time-inconsistency, or the difficulty of predicting one's future preferences.

Working at Walmart or in third-world sweatshops is judged not-euvoluntary by critics because the worker's BATNA is unemployment; economists' reply that the worker is better off is met with 'I don't care,' which really means the disparity in badness is too large—Marx's 'reserve army of the unemployed' lets the corporation take advantage.

Much of the popular belief that Walmart is exploitative is manufactured by self-interested propagandists (notably unions) who profit when Walmart is kept out, rather than arising from firsthand experience or genuine evidence.

Refusing to hire someone for a low local wage out of moral discomfort can itself harm the worker: the social-work student who would not pay a Nepali washerwoman ten cents an hour 'exploited her by not exploiting her,' assigning her to a worse outcome, since the woman voluntarily sought the work.

Paying far above the local market wage (e.g., a hundred times the going rate) would not solve the discomfort but would create a giant rent-seeking contest, as workers compete to capture the artificially high wage.

Banning a not-euvoluntary transaction is a non sequitur: the only question actually posed is whether to allow this specific exchange, not whether to restructure society so no one is in such a desperate position; outlawing the choice removes the desperate person's only means of bettering their lot.

Unpleasant low-wage work (peddling on credit, immigrant menial jobs, child labor in 1910) was part of a dynamic set of incentives in a growing economy that allowed families to advance across generations; making such transactions illegal would have harmed the very people it intends to protect.

Even if society agreed people shouldn't be forced into desperate choices, the economist's answer is that we don't know how to create the world where no one is in that position, so outlawing the activity makes things worse rather than solving the underlying problem.

Some bans framed as 'do-goodism' are actually bootleggers-and-Baptists arrangements where a self-interested party cloaks its agenda in kindness, as Munger suggests is true for opposition to Walmart.

Libertarian-paternalist 'nudging' is dangerous because the people empowered to nudge will respond not to what is best for the individual being nudged but to what is best for those holding the power, regardless of how smart the nudgers are.

The 'no later regret' condition implies that to justify regulation one must assume people consistently make choices they will regret, i.e., that they cannot make their own choices correctly—an assumption Roberts argues the state generally should not act on.

Voltaire's Candide mocks the 'best of all possible worlds' framing where freely choosing to run a gauntlet rather than be executed is celebrated as glorious freedom, paralleling the economist's reduction of any chosen option to a welfare improvement.

Economists treat voluntary exchange as necessarily mutually beneficial: if a party chose to enter a transaction, it must make each party better off by their own subjective valuation.