  As noted above, there are a number of accounts of coercion that insist that coercion is a violation of right, or otherwise normatively defective, of which Alan Wertheimer's Coercion is the most prominent. But if coercion is necessarily immoral action, then it is hard to explain how an act of coercion could count as justified.[26] Among other implications, this view is in apparent contradiction with the traditional approach to coercion which treats states as paradigmatically, even necessarily users of coercion. As William Edmundson has pointed out (and as Nozick 1969, had noticed), if the state is justified in punishing wrongdoers, then when it threatens to do so, it does not threaten to make them worse off than they ought to be (Edmundson 1995 and 1998, chs. 4–6). Hence on an approach to coercion that insists it is immoral activity, the state's use of police powers to enforce the law is not coercive.