  With respect to his thinking about coercion, Mill is most famous for his views, in On Liberty, about what coercion is not fit to do: namely, be used to regulate people's behavior for their own good. Like his predecessors and his mentor Jeremy Bentham, Mill associates coercion with the state's powers to punish lawbreakers. But Mill seems in general to take a more expansive view of what coercion amounts to than did those surveyed above, appearing to treat the terms “coercion” and “interference” as much the same thing in On Liberty. In stating the thesis of that work, Mill writes,