🤔 The 'Social Contract'

Definition

  • The ‘Social Contract’ is the belief that individual freedoms should be given up in exchange for protection and benefits from the state. It is generally used as an attempt to legitimise pervasive theft of an individual’s property using taxation.

Neither ‘social’ nor ‘contract’

“The Holy Roman Empire was not holy, not Roman and not an empire” – Voltaire

  • ‘Contract’ is a misnomer if the supposed parties to the contract have not consented. Ask yourself if you ever signed your social contract?
  • There is no written contract between the state (i.e. a national government) and you.
  • Was there an opportunity for you to decline or negotiation terms?
  • As nationals of a country, we are forced to be subject to the contry’s laws right at birth.

Two wrongs don’t make a right

  • The social contract is based on the premise that there are many social ills in society that we can attempt to mitigate with funds obtained via coercive taxation.
  • This utilitarian logic is undermined by the wasteful spending that is characteristic of any monopolized power.

“If you don’t like it, you can just leave”

  • There individual activity in countries is coordinated by an aggressing monopoly referred to legally as the state. There is little way of escaping being subjected to some involuntary form of ‘social contract’.

The real social contract

  • In some ways, joining the 3L Movement is a real social contract. Or at least a common understanding. Adoptors of the Live and Let Live Movement agree not to aggress against each other as we enjoy the huge social benefits as a result.