The so-called ‘social contract’ just means ‘the rest of us own you’

By David McElroy · September 22, 2011

Those on the progressive left are just flat-out lying when they claim they believe in individual rights. They certainly believe in group rights, but in their vision of the world, individuals have no rights that “society” doesn’t graciously allow them to have.

We’re told that society has the right to control us because of the “social contract” that we allegedly have with government. I don’t know about you, but I never got my copy of the contract to read and agree to before people with guns started coercing me to obey their will.

Let’s be clear. The so-called social contract is just an excuse to control you. What it means is that the people who expect you to obey them have invented a reason that you’re required to obey. Is that a contract? Or is that a one-sided demand, enforced at the barrel of a gun?

I’ve talked before about this social contract fiction, but it comes up again today because of a two-minute video clip from a U.S. Senate candidate in Massachusetts — in which she defends the progressive left version of the social contract by trying to justify higher taxes on people who make more money.

Here’s what Elizabeth Warren said:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.’ No! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Do you notice what she’s doing? She’s asserting that because some other people have extorted money from others and coerced other folks into handing over their cash — and those coercers have built roads and schools and police forces with it — you are somehow under a contract to obey them and hand your money over to them.

It’s not a contract if it’s not voluntary. It’s not a contract if one side forces the other to accept it. Instead, it’s slavery. If a plantation slave said he was tired of picking the cotton and wanted to leave and live his own life instead, the slaveowner might say, “Wait. You’ve eaten my food. You’ve slept in the housing I gave you. You live on my land. Because of that, you’re obligated to me. We have a contract here.”

Nobody sane would deny the right of the slave to break his chains if he can find a way. Nobody sane would claim that the unilateral arrangement made by the master obligated the slave to obey. Yet this is the position that the progressive left takes when it comes to the so-called social contract.

I’ve talked before about why taxation is a moral issue and why we need to start treating it as one. As long as we allow people such as Warren to convince productive people that they have a responsibility to obey, we will never be free. The first thing slaves have to free is their own minds.

There is no social contract, because you and I never agreed to one. There’s only a unilateral coercive group of people who believe the collective “people” own everybody. We can’t start thinking that people such as Warren have a point. I use the roads and the schools and the police she mentions, but it’s only because I haven’t had a choice. Other people haven’t had legitimate choices.

When people such as Warren start telling you about the responsibilities they say you have, ask them when you agreed to that arrangement. They won’t be able to answer the question, because we haven’t made any such contract.

They’re lying to us — and they assume we’re stupid enough not to notice.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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