Your’s Ian, or someone else’s?

Lefty logic, mindboggling iznit?

The Government can’t get you to do anything it wants, so it is a bit of a non-problem for most people.

But, from the top – you can leave. People do it all the time. It’s just not much fun or very practical. You can move to another country, but they might expect you to sign up to their social contract.

You can do it within this country for example You don’t have to abide by laws – but please don’t act surprised when they are still used against you.

So it is not an “illusion” but the “reality” that stymies the idiocy o9f “self-ownership”.

Jocks Coats idea that we should all individually explicitly agree a social contract is not very practical.

And of course people agree contracts they can’t actually read all the time. Marriage, friendship, Parenthhod, etc.
More to the point they don’t even read contracts they can read – clubs and societies, mobile phone charges etc. The idea of an “unwritten” constitution has been around for years. It being a misnomer, as the UK constitution is partly written, partly altering practice and convention. The USA has a written constitution but, that is far from being the be all and end all of the USA constitution.

The last point is just wrong – conscientious objectionand non-violent direct action are allowed under the social contract. I would argue that even violent direct action is sometimes allowed, as in South Africa under aprthheid.

What exactly is it “liberatians” want from all this “self-ownership” ? The great thing about liberatianism is that it never come up against reality or runs out of explanations. It specialises in explaining why reality has got it wrong.

A more sensible dividing line is, as Ian B says, between ‘slaves’ and ‘the state’.

Now, on what side of the line do land and property owners fall? I reckon that they are more akin to “the state” because without “the state” there can be no land-ownership; and once you have a collective of land-owners, you have “a state”.

On the other hand, the tenant class is more akin to being “slaves” as they cannot “leave” in the economic or political sense, they have to go on paying rent (and income tax and all the other crap), because “the state” and “the landowners” taken together demand it.

Finally, I ask myself, who should be paying (in the literal sense of £-s-d) for the day-to-day running of “the state”? The landowners, by paying taxes on land values, or the tenants/salves, by paying taxes on incomes or production?

The state may be the agent(s) which enforce those laws in the name of sovereignty, but neither is it above them. Without a social contract to define the essence of secularity and separation between the different sides there would be no code by which any rule of law can be maintained and the civic system (such as it is) would revert completely to a law of the jungle governed by the arbitrary whim of the most powerful.

A distorted sense of what the ‘social contract’ entails may protect the powerful from the weak, but no ‘social contract’ gives no protection to those powerless to help themselves.

I think at least part of the division in the debate stems from confusion between collectist terms like ‘state’ and ‘nation’ (especially by any avowed individualist who prefers to lump them all together according to their own prejudices), while another part stems from confusion between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought’ to be. Finally I think it would also help if we discussed the contents of the contract in more detail rather than trying to navigate blindly though undefined territory.

I start with legitimacy, which in turn requires validity, consistency, relevance underpinned by regular elections. If any of these conditions aren’t completed then the flow of the contract reverses and any authority is weakened until it collapses or is reasserted.

At present Brown is unelected, is applying laws selectively and introducing unhelpful or empty measures. He is failing to accept or live up to his responsibility and is accumulating more problems for himself by going too far in too many areas – he has backed himself into a corner politically and the only way out is for him to go. The sooner the better. The only question is under what circumstance it will happen.

Any new leader will have a honeymoon period as they are given the benefit of the doubt for a period, but if they fail to abide by the terms of the ‘social contract’ then they too will suffer an eventual ignominious demise.

How seriously a government breached the terms determines how long it the pain lasts and how hard it is felt.

Now I know that these progressives I’ve argued with are hypocritical- in that if democracy voted in e.g. a racist party, they would not accept that as legitimate, and they’d do everything they could to deny that such a social contract was valid. But nonetheless I tried to keep focus on the argument as it is usually presented, which is as a justification of absolute and arbitrary state authority.

One other thing- there is an argument that the Social Contract is not defined, that it is a nebulous fiction, that it is not written down anywhere. Well all I can find on the Social Contract seems to make clear that it is the laws of the nation, and the meta-laws (constitution) which defines how those laws are made. The social contract is not social convention e.g. it’s rude to pick your nose in church. It is the laws of the land, enforced by the state. As such, it is written down somewhere, for anyone to peruse. Thus the Social Contract would be something like,

“I, Ian B, agree to obey all the laws of the land. I agree to submit to the state and its appointed representatives as defined in those laws. I agree that such political representatives as are appointed under the laws of the land may make or repeal such laws as they so desire by constitutionally specified methods.”

I first saw this discussed a few days ago in the context of taxation: what the proponent of the argument that ID cards were like tax failed to address is that we are relatively content, in principle, with paying tax (and if enough of us were not, it would show in the polls; there are arguments about how much, and on what, but the broad principle is accepted) but there is less of a consensus regarding ID cards. OK, our democracy is flawed and crude, but to ignore the very idea is nuts, and results in crazy arguments like “ID cards are like tax in principle”.

Perhaps “social contract” ideas are those that are so consensual that there is never any democratic debate around them: you pay tax; you obey the law of the land; you accept that there are bodies that are entitled to enforce the above (even if we quibble about exactly how it is done). The detail of those systems relies on (deeply flawed) democratic processes to make them work, but the principles are rather beyond argument.

So on one level it seems a wholly fatuous discussion. Labelling certain things part of a “social contract” certainly seems redundant; they might more accurately be called “uncontentious issues within our democracy”.

But to decry the notion of a social contract entirely would be dangerous, as it is to question the general acceptance of these largely uncontroversial notions. We can all think of instances in which we would prefer not to be bound by them: I would prefer not to have to give up a third of my earnings in tax; there are times when I would like to stick a knife in that so-and-so who has just annoyed me beyond measure without fear of reprisal; but it is right that we do not disregard the prevailing view on these issues. In short, we must forsake some of our individual interest and liberty: whether we say that’s under the terms of a social contract, or on pain of reprisal from a democratically-sanctioned state, seems wholly irrelevant.

That would still leave the deep, hard arguments – but you can refer those to Ian.