CB writes: I did not sign nor was ever given the opportunity to reject putting my signature on the Constitution…must I obey it? Must I therefore respect the President and Congress and the Supreme Court as the three branches of our government? Can I take away the guns, religious freedoms, and speech freedoms of others because I never signed the document protecting those rights? How about this: Must I adhere to the Ten Commandments? Not only did I never sign a contract to obey those decrees, I wasn’t even there when they were presented to man as to have the opportunity to voice my dissent if I felt the need to do so.
We are all obliged to participate in an unsigned and informal social contract. Whether it is from God or another higher power, as some feel, from the government, as others feel, or just from an unspoken but accepted notion that since we all live here, we all need to respect the rights of others. I am not even going to comment on your ridiculous (and incredibly unoriginal and redundant) blasting of the label of “liberal” and how taxation is therefore evil and constitutes theft. I simply hope that, in the future, you avoid trying to score petty points with ridiculous claims such as that printed above; it insults the intelligence of us all.
Let me try to put CB straight. Since he is not the Federal Government, he is not bound by the Constitution. Nor am I surprised that he won’t comment on the “taxation = theft” point, since, like all so-called liberals, he has no answer for it except to give away his belief that all property belongs to the collective.
No one is going to put him or anyone else into jail simply for violating the Ten Commandments. He would also have to violate a law that happens to run in parallel with one of the Commandments, as he can certainly hope to sacrifice to as many idols as he likes without fear of jail, depending, of course, on what he is sacrificing and assuming that he is not violating any safety codes or backyard-burning bans.
There is no such thing as a social contract. Once again we see, as Hayek pointed out, adding the adjective “social” completely destroys the meaning of the following noun. What a sad butchery of the language. As for insulting his intelligence, I think he’s done a rather nice job of that all by himself.