First, if you've ever served in Government and taken the Oath of Office, you signed the contract. Explicitly. If you want to see it, send a FOIA request to your agency's HR dept. Everyone who's ever served in the military signed the contract. Everyone who's ever served as a civil servant signed the contract.

If you're not a member of that patriotic crew and you're still wondering, the rest of this is for you.

To set the stage a bit, consider that some time ago, before you were born, a bunch of people got together and used their individual liberties to offer services based on resources that they owned part of individually and owned outright when taken as a whole. Individually, they decided that they would act together. So you weren't consulted in the creation of the system. Sorry! We haven't figured out how to consult the not-born-for-another-200-years crowd yet. That you didn't get to participate in the system's creation is not an argument against its applicability to you.

Cognizant of both the possibility for tyranny and the possibility of unfairness, they made sure that everyone got an equal say in how the resources and services were provided and priced (we'll ignore for now the mistakes regarding equality for blacks and women made by our forefathers if that's OK with you). How do they do that? Civics 101:



1. voting

2. almost anyone meeting residency requirements can hold any office and

3. open access to your congresscritter

But let's say you don't participate in decision-making, either by voting or by being elected because you either choose to exercise your right and freedom not to or you are not a citizen, how do they justify you being held to their rules?

There are two answers:



1. Jurisdiction. Just like any other alien or citizen, you are subject to the laws and rules of the land you are present in unless you can negotiate for or the citizenry deigns to grant you exception. Your presence mandates that you are subject to the laws.

"But wait! My presence doesn't mean that I signed a contract, right!?" And you are correct, you didn't. It doesn't excuse you from being subject to the laws of the land, but you did not sign a contract. You are correct, you have not signed a contract.

However, asking that you not be subject to the same rules as everyone else is something you're going to have to bargain for, no member of the group of people exercising their individual rights to be a member of that group has any requirement to exempt you from the rules governing the use of their resources and indeed, it would constitute special privilege to grant you such. That's unlikely at best considering that you're using all the same resources that they are and they're paying for those resources and you're trying to avoid paying for them.

But that's only part of the equation. The other part is much, much worse for the argument that 'You didn't sign a contract so you shouldn't be subject to the rules.'



2. Implied consent and implied assent. The watchphrase here is: It is immaterial whether a man gives assent by his words or by his acts and deeds. Where this argument that 'I didn't sign any contracts' really goes wrong is that it's not just saying "I consent to abide by the rules" that constitutes consent to abide by the rules.

Taking advantage of the services offered is also consent to abide by the rules. If the people exercising their individual rights to act in concert provide you with a road that you use to get to work, then you are consenting to the rules laid down by those people, even if you do not consider yourself part of those people. You have the freedom to come up with alternate means of transportation, but you do not have the 'freedom' to grant yourself exception to those rules.

Let's talk about that for a second. It's counter-intuitive. The reason why you do not have the freedom to grant yourself exception to the rules you consent to when you use a service provided by someone else because this actually represents an act of aggression on your part: they have provided a service and they have determined that their price is the sum of rules X, Y and Z including payment sometimes.

If you take the service or resource and do not pay the price requested you have stolen that service or resource. The people who you have stolen from are perfectly within their rights to come after you with enforcement trained individuals (each of whom are also exercising their individual rights to be part of the enforcement arm of the community). Some of those trained individuals - we call them Police Officers - have guns because we do not dispermit gun ownership in this society and they need to be able to kill you if you are dumb enough resist your arrest for theft with potentially lethal force.

If that's intolerable to you, you can, if you like, come up with some other way to get around that doesn't use roads - that's your freedom, just like other people are free to individually decide that using the roads is well worth assenting to the rules that go along with the roads, Rules that they all, individually, have assented to and consented to both by use and by vote.



Followup Q: So, what happens when the people decide something that I disagree with?"

Well, there's some, but not much, help for you there. In most cases there's no recourse, you got outvoted. Whining about it is just sour grapes. Grow a pair and move on. However, in some cases, what people decide to do may contradict a freedom expressly granted you in our founding document, the Constitution. If that's the case you have recourse in the Court system. There you must convince a judge (or a series of judges, relying on just one judge can be as foolhardy as relying on just one political party) that you have had a freedom unnecessarily curtailed.

But understand, you have no rights that are absolute. You can properly and justly have



1. your property taken away in the form of fines for minor acts of aggression and improper takings

2. your freedom taken away in the form of incarceration for more serious takings and acts of aggression and

3. your life taken away in the form of capital punishment for truly egregious acts of aggression (which I would argue is probably incorrect, if only because restitution cannot be granted you in the case of a mistake)

It's useful here to look at a recent vote in the Senate. They just affirmed Sec. John Kerry as Secretary of State. Now, whatever you may think of him and his policies is not the point here, it's all good for the purposes of discussion. What's important here is that there was a vote taken and the affirmation passed 97 to 3. The two Senators from Texas voted NO along with a Senator from Oklahoma.

Now, they've exercised their freedom to disagree with the proposal and others exercised their freedom to agree with it. What those two Senators are NOT free to do is impose their views on everyone else. That would be an unfair taking of the rights of others. They agreed to abide by the rules governing Senators when they decided to run for office, just like you agreed to abide by the rules governing citizens when you



1. entered a voting booth

2. drove on a road

3. worked in the marketplace provided to you for the intent of wealth-making

4. benefited from schools or

5. used any of a number of services provided to you by yourself and everyone else.

If you don't like that, you should stop using those services. You may complain that you don't feel that you have any alternative but to use those services and that may even be true! You may feel that way but other people are under no obligation at all to solve your self-imposed problems. Nobody's forcing you to refuse the use of ubiquitous services. Your lack of creativity is no implication of requirement to provide a solution for you on their part. That's a harsh statement, but I'm not sure it can be made more palatable. But then again, like I just said, I'm under no requirement to solve your self-imposed problems for you. That would be an unfair abridgement of my own freedom of action.