Your Neighbor’s Contract You Can’t Refuse
Imagine you are good friends with your next door neighbor. Now also imagine that he is an ex-Marine, super-duper black belt in 12 different forms of martial arts, and he is a technology wiz who has all the latest gadgets and knows how to use them. Your neighbor uses his techie abilities and latest gadgets to form the most advanced home defense system ever created. On top of that, even if he does encounter an evildoer on his property, his military and martial arts background will surely overwhelm the sorry intruder. Thus, we can say with certainty, you have the best neighbor ever!
One day you go and check the mail. Inside you find a bill from your neighbor for $300. The bill reads, “One month’s defense services…… $300.” This perplexes you to say the least. You don’t recall ever entering into an agreement with your neighbor for his services. Not even a verbal one. A strong sense of injustice overwhelms you, but before you walk next door to give him a piece of your mind, you realize who you are dealing with and back off.
Now you are indeed benefiting from your neighbor’s incredible home defense system and self-defense capabilities. That is a fact. However, you never asked for it, nor did you agree to it after the fact.
When you finally work up the courage to discuss the issue with your neighbor, he thankfully keeps his cool and shows you a contract he wrote out for you. “The contact is right here my friend. It describes the service I’m providing you and the rate at which you are billed. I think $300 per month is MORE than fair” he says.
Swallowing very hard, you reply, “But I never consented to this contract — neither before you installed your system, nor after. And look, my signature is nowhere to be found on that piece of paper.”
This argument is not good enough for your neighbor and he, quite predictably, sticks to his proverbial guns. He claims that despite the fact that you never consented to this agreement, it still stands because there is no question that you benefit from his home defense services. In fact, “I’ve been watching over your house just as much as my own for the past month,” he says.
What sort of recourse do you have in this situation? Your neighbor is not going to back down, and he is much stronger than you. He never comes out and says it, but implicitly you fear he will take the $300 if you don’t willingly give it up. You must take this case to court and convince a judge that this type of contract is illegal. You never consented to it, your signature is nowhere to be found, and you don’t accept his services. At this point it is fair to say that the injustice is plain to see. A contract forced on someone else is not a contract. It is force.
I bring this example up because although we can all agree that you do in fact gain from your neighbor’s home defense system, it is immoral for you to be forced into paying for something you never consented to, nor ever asked for. Your neighbor was in the wrong when he tried to give you the old “offer you can’t refuse” bit.
The part that still confuses me is why Constitutionalists don’t see this parallel when debating limited government and the so called “social contract” in general, and the Constitution in particular. Lysander Spooner wrote about the“Constitution of No Authority” way back in 1867. It was obvious to him even back then that you cannot impose a contract on people who had nothing to do with it.
If forcing a contract on someone is so plainly wrong in my above neighbor example, when the victim is so clearly benefiting from the contract, knows the guy, and is friends with him, how can we possibly say that the government can make and enforce contracts on us against our will? The only possible way to justify such force is to say that the government owns all the land in America. It is to say that you are merely renting the land you live on and all the things you own. That you don’t have the final say over your own body and your own property.
If you’d like to believe such nonsense, go ahead. I choose to believe I own my body and all my property and that no one, no matter what kind of uniform they are wearing can force me into a contract I had nothing to do with, nor consented to. And yet that is the situation we face everyday. We pay for services we never requested, for prices we never agreed to, from people we never met.
….. on second thought, you better go back and reconcile with your neighbor. Pay him now, because he might be your best friend when the government bureaucrats start looking for more money to feed their bankrupt beast.
Article was originally posted by Justin Longo Dec 09
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