"These two arguments for inalienability, one looking to coercion and the other to invidious symbolism, begin to merge if the definition of coercion is broadened to include the desperate circumstances that are likely to be present when a competent, undeceived person, who is not being threatened with violence, is willing to sell himself into slavery. A man would have to be in pretty tight straights before he would agree to a contact like the one Bailey signed, but he signed it, and so did many others. They were not always physically threatened. There is no evidence that Bailey was. Their acquiescence cannot simply be dismissed as the product of fraud or incompetence; employment on such terms may indeed have been the best option they had. Even though Bailey’s poverty or powerlessness does not fit into classical economic notions of “coercion”-he did, after all, willingly enter into a deal that made both parties better off-we are reluctant to call a decision made in such circumstances a free choice. Consent is an ambiguous concept."