American incarceration rates and health care tied to employer come to mind.
So the fact that, upon trivial examination, a society is revealed to not actually be that permissive, is not evidence against the assertion that permissive societies are harmonious. I mean, I don't think RodericDay was saying that those two examples were impermissiveness that actually increases harmony.
> One might suspect that all our beneficial habits would break down if there weren't an almighty parental figure lying in wait to punish us
I interpreted this in the vein of a libertarian "we don't need a nanny state". And so I assumed that the person was thinking of the USA as a "permissive society in harmony" and of something like North Korea as an "less permissive society in disarray", as opposed to Sweden as a "less permissive society in harmony".
And so I wanted to challenge the notion that the USA is "permissive".
But we were talking about coercion and authority: GP seemed unable to imagine taking decisions without them. I wanted to point out that most of us are already doing that, to some extent. I hope that in the rest of my life I'll see some progress: more decisions based on personal preferences rather than authority and coercion. To that end, I'm an anarchist. That is, I oppose arbitrary authority.