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Political liberals have often criticized what are sometimes called "coercive wage bargains." Criticizing today's libertarians, philosopher Virginia Held claims that they have gone much further than their philosophical ancestor John Locke. Locke, according to Held, believed that the needs of the destitute outweighed the rights of property. Thus, Locke wrote in his First Treatise Of government:
But we know God hath not left one man so to the mercy of another that he may starve him if he please. God, the Lord and Father of all, has given no one of His children such a property in his peculiar portion of the things of this world, but that He has given his needy brother a right to the surplusage of his goods, so that it cannot justly be denied him when his pressing wants call for it; and, therefore, no man could ever have a just power over the life of another by right of property in land or possessions, since it would always be a sin in any man of estate to let his brother perish for want of affording him relief out of his plenty. As justice gives every man a title to the product of his honest industry and the fair acquisitions of his ancestors descended to him, so charity gives every man a title to so much out of another's plenty as will keep him from extreme want where he has no means to subsist otherwise. And a man can no more justly make use of another's necessity to force him to become his vassal by withholding that relief God requires him to afford to the wants of his brother, than he that has more strength can seize upon a weaker, master him to his obedience, and, with a dagger at his throat, offer him death or slavery. [Locke, First Treatise Of Government, Section #42]

In this excerpt Virginia Held criticizes Robert Nozick's views:
For Nozick, economic transactions are never coercive. If a poor person sells her lifetime labor for a pittance, even if she sells herself into slavery to stay alive, she has in Nozick's view made a free choice to do so. As long as the rich man buying up the poor person's life or labor does not threaten to make the poor person's life worse than it already is if she does not sell, such buying up of the lives of others is not, in Nozick's view, an infringement on anyone's freedom. For Nozick, if we leave people alone we respect their rights, even if they are starving and we refuse to share with them any of our surplus....

For Nozick...freedom for the rich and powerful requires that they be free from interference in hanging on to their holdings. An interference such as taxation to provide for those in need is in Nozick's view an unjustified attack on their freedom: "taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor." The poor and powerless will likewise be free from attack and from having their holdings taken away. But if they have no holdings, if they lack what they need to live, they are left with the freedom to nothing. The deficiencies of a purely negative conception of freedom have seldom been more striking than in Nozick's depiction of what he takes to be a free society, where some persons will be free to sell themselves into slavery in exchange for food and others will be free to buy them. [Held, Rights and Goods, p. 132-33]