so it's not strong-arming if the force being applied is economic, i.e. homelessness, hunger, lack of medical care -- rather than direct threat of GBH as in a baseball bat to the kneecaps?

I tend to suspect this is the thinking of a person who has never been homeless or hungry, or put their kids to bed hungry :-)  choices are exercised in a context.  Wal*Mart and similar large combines have the power to shape and control the context within which people make their choices, narrowing the field and presenting enough large sticks that no carrot is really necessary.  how can such choices be called "free"?  they are no more free than "the lady or the tiger," and the odds are worse.

a strong distinction should be made between choices seeking to find the least of many evils, and choices where the chooser exercises the option to reach for a gest among several goods.  the latter is what I would call a truly "free choice" -- the choice of a gifted child of affluent parents between several excellent colleges, for example, seeking to select the one best suited to a solid education and good career prospects.

the "choice" of the resident of a gutted small town to scrape by on welfare and charity, or to take a crap job from a paternalistic, abusive, cheapskate, tax-dodging employer like Wal*Mart, does not strike me as "free".  nor is the economic history of these towns a textbook example of rational actors maximising utility.  corruption, violence (force and fraud, the nemesis of libertarians), chicanery, undue influence, nepotism, enclosure, loan sharking, price fixing, all have engineered the demise of the peasantry and the yeoman farmer.  to some extent gullible rural populations swallowed carefully prepared poison bait and participated with initial enthusiasm in their own execution, but over the last 150 years many resisted and found resistance futile in the face of concentrated capital.

according to Drew's pseudo-darwinistic model of commerce as expressed here, it seems to be simply natural and right that the clever and unscrupulous should amass wealth and use the gravity field of that dense wealth to amass yet more without any effort, leaving it to their children and grandchildren, snowballing over the decades, until we re-create feudal baronialism in all its glory.  and this is the situation that ideas like participatory democracy, land reform, Jubilee and other Levelling impulses were invented to correct:  the luxury of the few and the misery of the many.

if this were a peaceful and contented state for humans to live in, there would never have been any revolutions :-)  we don't meekly accept feudalism forever.  seems to me what Drew is arguing for is a lack of the kind of preventive regulatory intervention (modest Levelling of the kind that even the wealthy admitted was wise in the time of FDR) that reduces the probability of violent revolution.  I would prefer a degree of tinkering that flattened out the cycle of concentration and dissipation of wealth, rather than an episodic crash-n-burn cycle of violent extrema.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...