Last week we examined the “social contract” in some depth, to see if it passes as a legal concept. This week we’ll examine two follow-up issues: one that I didn’t mention and one that I mentioned, but didn’t delve into.
And for those who missed last week’s post, we started by noting that the social contract is the concept that describes the origin of society and the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. It asserts that all of us have consented to surrender some of our rights to a ruling group, in exchange for the protection of our remaining rights.
The Contract of Adhesion
There is one kind of contract that could be claimed as legitimately applying to the social contract. (This claim negates nothing we covered last week, and it’s also a dodgy type of contract.) It’s called a contract of adhesion, and it’s the kind of contract you “agree” to when using a parking garage. The tiny print, which you never read, absolves the garage from more or less everything and punishes you for any error.
In an adhesion contract, there is no negotiating, no clarification of terms, and very often an imbalance of power.
Courts frequently strike down such contracts, for reasons like these:
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- The contract is unfair or oppressive to one party. (Unconscionablity.)
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- You wouldn’t have agreed, if you had known the real terms. (Reasonable expectations.)
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- If the terms were so complex, or finding them was so convoluted, that they aren’t knowable by any practical standard.
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- If the terms changed between when you agreed and when they were enforced.
I’ll stop here and leave you to examine the social contract in this light.
An Honest Justification
I finished our previous post by saying this:
Those who wish to justify the status quo are free to do so, but I’d like them to put forth justifications that are honest and substantial, not merely slogans endlessly repeated.
I think that’s a fair request, but it also struck me that since the social contract is the only thing that has entered most minds, coming up with an honest alternative might be daunting. And so, I’ll play advocate and provide one:
Forcible rule of the few over the many might be defensible, if all other options would be worse.
This justification would require many follow-on proofs, of course. Here are some that spring to mind:
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- What are the alternatives? Is that really all of them?
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- Have they truly been proved worse? By what standards of comparison and proof?
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- When and how often have they been proven false? By whom? When those people were paid, from whom did the money come? What were the self-censorship pressures they faced?
I’ll leave you to wrestle with these things, should you wish. But this is, at least, an honest line of inquiry.
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Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com
Quite a project. It could be the life’s work of many.
It’s been my life’s work since I read philosopher Ayn Rand’s famous novel “Atlas Shrugged”, about which she said when she published it in 1957, “If it sells 50,000 copies it will save the world.” Over 10 million today, 3 to me, and 3 political parties have developed from her work, the Tea Party, the Libertarian Party, the American Capitalist Party and the party I formed called the capitalist Trade Party which will never seek or accept political power over any innocent person. There is a capitalist alternative to the fascist Social Contract called simply capitalist rights protective contracts between professional rights protective businesses, such as insurance and security companies, and clients who know their rights and are willing to pay voluntarily for that service. Once they get the idea that their whole careers have been focused on protecting the innocent clients from various losses due to some causes, perhaps they will apply Say’s Law [Supply Creates Its Own Demand] and discover that no government has ever protected any rights from themselves, only from ‘others’, and realize they can protect ALL rights better and cheaper than professional rights violators called governments. They will then make the offers to protect All rights.