When the U.S. government sells a Treasury security, it is making a promise to pay back the money, with interest, according to a set schedule.

Businesses and individuals make promises like this all the time. They’re effectively (and often explicitly) contracts. When you renege on one, you’d better have good reason. Simply choosing not to honor a contract because you don’t feel like it earns you a lawsuit and a deserved reputation as a deadbeat.

Those who fail to meet their obligations because of some event out of their control (the legal term for such eventualities appears to be “frustration” or “impossibility”) are often let off. Those who simply run out of money have the remedy of bankruptcy court. Renege on your obligations with no good reason, though, and you are granted no such mercy. You shouldn’t be. The sanctity of contracts is at the heart of the success of the capitalist enterprise over the past two centuries. Mess with it at your peril.

You probably already know where I’m going with this. The U.S. government is currently toying with the possibility of reneging on its promises, even though it has the resources to honor them. This may not be exactly how it looks from Washington, where the battle over raising the debt ceiling is all about budget priorities and political optics. But from the perspective of those who have entered into explicit or implicit contracts with the U.S. — especially the buyers of Treasury securities, but also Social Security recipients, military contractors, you name it — even hinting at default looks suspiciously like the behavior of a scoundrel.

It’s pretty clear where the power to avoid breach of contract currently lies. Yes, there’s an ongoing debate between the Administration and Republican Congressional leaders over how to reduce the deficit. And yes, the Treasury surely has ways to shuffle money around and delay some payments in order to avoid stiffing bondholders after August 2. But the power to raise the debt ceiling and avert the risk of default lies entirely in the hands of the Republican majority in the House and, to a lesser extent, the Republican minority in the Senate. If no strings were attached, the Democrats would approve the necessary legislation and the President would sign it in a flash.

The Republicans have understandably been using this power as a bargaining chip to get a better deal in the deficit negotiations. But there comes a point where a responsible negotiator declares victory and moves on, which is what House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell would dearly love to do. But the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party won’t let them. This doesn’t appear to be just a negotiating ploy. These people would rather risk breaking contracts than compromise, and opinion polls indicate that a lot of voters feel the same way (although the tide does appear to be turning against them).

This behavior makes clear just how unhelpful labels like conservative and liberal have become lately. My primer on the moral authority of contracts has been Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried’s Contract as Promise, written in 1981 (four years before Fried went to Washington to become Ronald Reagan’s Solicitor General) as a defense of the “classical liberal” (what most Americans would call conservative) approach to contracts against an assault from the Left. Yet now a group of politicians who call themselves conservatives appear willing to cheerfully repudiate the contracts that the U.S. government has entered into — or, perhaps worse, cheerfully pretend that their actions aren’t putting the country at risk of default.

Historian Mark Lilla wrote a provocative essay last year exploring the roots of what he called the “Tea Party Jacobins” — their philosophy an amalgam of 1960s anarchism and 1980s selfishness:

The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing — and unwarranted — confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

I don’t know if that’s true, but it sure is fun to read. And the description does fit some aspects of the debt ceiling debate. It also fits some more positive phenomena — think of the general Internet-era disdain for established institutions and old ways of doing business. Still … contracts? Do we really want to just start ignoring them?

Of course, a lot of newly elected Republican House members can say, with some justification, that they have a contract with the people who elected them not to raise taxes, ever. With the federal tax burden currently the lowest it’s been in 68 years (measured by tax receipts as a share of GDP), this does seem an odd pledge to have made. But that’s another argument, for another day. The House GOP newcomers are free to vote to increase the debt ceiling and against any new taxes, thus maintaining the sanctity of both contracts (if not necessarily their viability in the next Republican primary).

The real problem here, in fact, may lie with the very existence of the debt ceiling. It’s been around since 1917, when Congress, in legislation designed to fund the U.S. entry into World War I, first started giving the Treasury significant leeway in designing and selling debt securities. Lawmakers imposed the debt limit to keep some control over the process. By setting it as a dollar amount and not adjusting for inflation or the size of the economy, they ensured that raising it would be a frequent necessity. After a brief respite during the flush late 1990s, there have been 10 votes to raise the ceiling since 2001, usually accompanied by some amount of Sturm und Drang.

I used to think this was a healthy if often silly exercise, forcing Washington to face up to the potential dangers of its deficits long before investors in U.S. debt securities did. But now it’s the very existence of the debt ceiling that’s beginning to scare investors.

There is an argument that the very existence of the debt limit is unconstitutional, given that the 14th Amendment decrees that “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

Invoking this clause and ignoring the debt ceiling would probably not be a great political move for the Obama Administration, and the President has so far avoided talk of this possibility. But it would be in keeping with the time-honored conservative teaching that contracts are sacred.