Posted on 04/01/2002 4:25:19 AM PST by Free Fire Zone
Interesting, I have to look it up.
Check this out.
BUMP!!!
This sounds like our statist friends here. The mental contortions they go through to rationalize the mentality of "You can abide by the 'rules', change them or leave" is always amazing.
My reason for thinking we'll have to grapple seriously with the "social contract" is the nature of rights: those conditions which, when violated, give rise to the moral use of force. Rights are not asserted against inanimate Nature, but against others like ourselves, who also claim rights. Robert A. Heinlein put it as follows in his novel Starship Troopers:
"What right to life does a man drowning in the ocean have? The ocean will not hearken to his cries."
Rights emerge from our desire to participate in a society with others like ourselves. They are an agreement we attempt to reach with those others about the boundaries each of us is permitted to enforce against others' wanderings and desires.
Liberty, understood in the Lockean rather than the Proudhonian sense, is the right to do as one wishes with that which is rightfully one's own. In short, it is tied inextricably to concepts of property and ownership. But we have extensive empirical evidence that ownership is a contractarian condition, an agreement not to molest the demarcated ownership rights of others if assured of a reciprocal guarantee.
Every nonviolent enforcement mechanism capable of arbitrating disputes over any right is also contractarian in nature. That is, the parties to the dispute must agree up front to abide by the decision reached by the mechanism. This is an implicit contract when one brings a dispute into a government court, or an explicit contract if the parties make recourse to a private mediator.
When we look at situations where no contractarian mechanism commands the assent of all parties, such as international dealings, we see a lack of fidelity to any concept of rights or justice. We see war and chaos. For example, when the UN announced its partition plan in 1947, the Jews of Palestine accepted it. The Palestinian Arabs rejected it. The abrogation of the agreement to abide by the UN mechanism was followed by a bloody war. This is not to say that the UN's decision was necessarily the best, nor that that body was necessarily the right one to rule on the matter. Nevertheless, once the Palestinians abrogated the implicit contract to abide by the UN's decision, war became inevitable.
This isn't an airtight case for social contract theory, just some observations and a suggestion that it will be harder to distance ourselves from it than a naive approach might indicate.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com
But we insist that this Union shall not be held together by force whenever it shall have ceased to cohere by the mutual attraction of its parts; and whenever the slave States or the cotton States only shall unitedly and coolly say to the rest, "We want to get out of the Union," we shall urge that their request be acceded to.
- New York Tribune of 16 November, 1860
A union held together by the bayonet would be nothing better than a military despotism.
-New York Herald of Friday, 23 November, 1860
A few of us agree. The rest of the sheeple just plod along, admiring their continued loss of freedoms and the creation of the socialist nanny-state.
Bump for Nozick.
Lincoln – in my mind, one of the best presidents this country ever had ....
Lots of us constitutional conservatives agree. His successfull defending of the constitution kept this country together, and led to the great 14th amendment, which may yet save our 2nd amendment rights from overzealous state gun laws, advocated by statist's who know not what they do.
Yep. ---- The rest of the sheeple just plod along, admiring their continued loss of freedoms and the creation of the socialist nanny-state.
To all to whom these Presents shall come, we the undersigned Delegates of the States affixed to our Names send greeting.
Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts-bay Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.
The Stile of this Confederacy shall be "The United States of America".
Agreed to by Congress 15 November 1777 In force after ratification by Maryland, 1 March 1781
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The friends of our country have long seen and desired, that the power of making war, peace, and treaties, that of levying money and regulating commerce, and the correspondent executive and judicial authorities should be fully and effectually vested in the general government of the Union: But the impropriety of delegating such extensive trust to one body of men is evident-Hence results the necessity of a different organization. (Letter of the President of the Federal Convention, Dated September 17, 1787, to the President of Congress, Transmitting the Constitution.)
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Constitution of the United States : Preamble
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
(Emphasis added.)
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Arguably the United States was formed as a perpetual union under the Articles of Confederation, and was reorganized under the Constitution leaving the perpetual union part intact. One time or another, some of the States tried to "bust the deal" and were forced to "face the wheel."
This looks like an argument that Lincoln had some justification in trying to preserve the Union.
I came across this recently at Project Avalon and thought I'd throw it into the mix.
According to dictionary.com, a meaning of "assert" is to defend or maintain. That being so, the History of mankind is replete with assertations against Nature (animate and inanimate) of man's right to live.
"What right to life does a man drowning in the ocean have? The ocean will not hearken to his cries."
Stupidity is often a Capital Crime in nature, so it sort of depends on how he came to be drowning, but that aside, he has the same right to life he would have if he was not drowning. It does not matter if the ocean does not hear him. A potential rescuer might. Or he could swim.
Let's rephrase that: "What right to life does a man attacked by a lion have? The lion will not hearken to his cries." The answer is much the same as what I said above. If he has no right merely because he's attacked, he is only prey.
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