At any given time, the fundamental obstacle to complete fulfillment of one's wants is nature itself. Hence the demand for "freedom from wants" is really a desire for liberation from the laws of nature—a patent absurdity.

In practice, the notion of "freedom from wants," if followed consistently, leads to a ludicrous inversion of the very concepts of freedom and force. For example, under this view, a seller who "wants" a higher income but can no longer find customers in the market is said to be "forced" to change his business habits. In order to preserve his "freedom from wants" and to protect him from the "force" thus wielded by callous buyers, we would have to force the latter to buy his product! This form of conceptual gerrymandering blurs the distinction between the antithetical concepts of freedom and force, depriving both notions of any distinct meaning or cognitive validity.

Hence the only sense of "freedom" with which we shall concern ourselves here is its epistemologically proper meaning, referring to freedom from the coercive actions of other human beings, including governments.

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