Now that's a different take. Mostly 'freedom of contract' is invoked in attempts to defend corporate personhood.
Still, the argument goes nowhere. Rights are not social constructions based on shared experiences. That is a Marxist idea!
Rights only inhere in individuals, as part of the nature of our creation. Groups DO NOT QUALIFY for rights.
'Individual right' is a redundant phrase, while 'collective right' is an oxymoron. Ayn Rand made this crystal clear:
Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression “individual rights” is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today’s intellectual chaos). But the expression “collective rights” is a contradiction in terms.
Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.
A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations.
Any group that does not recognize this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob . . . .
The notion of “collective rights” (the notion that rights belong to groups, not to individuals) means that “rights” belong to some men, but not to others—that some men have the “right” to dispose of others in any manner they please—and that the criterion of such privileged position consists of numerical superiority.
This is important stuff, I wish more people understood why.
The concept of individual rights is so prodigious a feat of political thinking that few men grasp it fully—and two hundred years have not been enough for other countries to understand it. But this is the concept to which we owe our lives—the concept which made it possible for us to bring into reality everything of value that any of us did or will achieve or experience.
You are granting Marx entirely too much credit in this one.