This is why I'm generally against unpaid internships, especially those that don't seem like education is their priority. I find the situation where one has to live and work unpaid for months or even a year just to have a chance at getting gainful employment to be coercive. We all, left or right, seem to agree that coercion is wrong, but we seem to disagree as to what it consists in. I would say that any market that demands unpaid labor is coercive. One can say that there are other industries that don't demand such situations, but then the free marketer is going against his own assumption that a laborer will find the thing that (s)he is good at and fill that niche. It appears to me to be an undue barrier to entry that automatically excludes less well off workers.