Replies

Izzy:

You're engaging in special pleading: instead of arguing for social contracts' validity, you're asserting that anyone who questions it is an idiot.

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-- I've been arguing all along that you've been ignoring our Constitutions validity as a social contract. -- Proof; - my first post to you on this thread:

To: Shalom Israel

"--- You're claiming I'm a party to a contract that I never agreed to, that you can't even state with any certain detail, that provides no clear enumeration of responsibilities nor specific provision of penalties for breach... in other words, a "social contract" is nothing like a "contract".
If you believe that society around me has some prior claim over me, then go ahead and say so--but don't bastardize the language itself by calling it a "contract".
The term was coined to give an air of legitimacy to a dubious concept.

-izzy-

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Can you agree with the concept that
our US Constitution is a 'social contract' worth honoring?

Here's and essay on the subject well worth reading:

The Social Contract and Constitutional Republics
Address:http://www.constitution.org/soclcont.htm

"--- Under the theory of the social contract, those rights which the individual brings with him upon entering the social contract are natural, and those which arise out of the social contract are contractual.
Those contractual rights arising out of the constitution are constitutional rights. However, natural rights are also constitutional rights.

The fundamental natural rights are life, liberty, and property.

However, it is necessary to be somewhat more specific as to what these rights include. Therefore, constitution framers usually expand them into such rights as the right of speech and publication, the right to assemble peaceably, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to travel over public roadways, and so forth.

The exercise of such natural rights may be restricted to the extent that they come into conflict with the exercise of the natural rights of other members of society, but only to the minimum degree needed to resolve such conflict.

Such natural rights are inalienable, meaning that a person cannot delegate them or give them away, even if he wants to do so.
That means that no constitutional provision which delegated to government at any level the power to take away such rights would be valid, even if adopted as an amendment through a proper amendment process.

Such rights apply to all levels of government, federal, state, or local.
Their enumeration in the constitution does not establish them, it only recognizes them.

Although they are restrictions on the power of government, the repeal of the provisions recognizing them would not remove the restrictions or allow the delegation of any power to deny them.
The people do not have that power, and therefore cannot delegate it to government. --"
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