The Social Contract

A post over at Charlotte Gore’s gaffe ask for discussion of one of the most vexing collectivist arguments- well at least I find it one of the most vexing anyway. It started me thinking very hard, as this is one collectivist position I’ve had intensely frustrating arguments about, but have never been able to score a palpable hit. It came up over and over again at one particularly progressive-liberal place I used to frequent, and my opponents would always ride off with a triumphant smirk while I was left mute and stymied, despite being certain I was right somehow. In a nutshell it goes like this-

“The state can bring in whatever laws it likes, as everyone is a signatory of the social contract who empowers the government to legislate. If you don’t like it, you are free to leave”.

Now libertarians don’t accept any of this of course. But the issue is; can we prove it wrong? It seems to be very hard to do so. Sure, we can say “fuck off, I didn’t sign your social contract”- and that satisfies us, but not our opponents. Or we can raise pragmatic arguments, such as “there is nowhere without a government for me to go”. But that doesn’t address the nub of the thing. Another good pragmatic argument is to point out extreme consequences- that for instance this argument can be used to justify the extermination of the Jews or the Armenians by the states in which they lived, since their government were also empowered arbitrarily by this “social contract”. But again that doesn’t actually disprove the point. Our opponent can point out that Nazi Germany or the Ottoman Empire were dictatorships and not social-contract empowered collectives, and then say “but if they were, yes, they would have the right to do that, so long as the Jews or Armenians were given the option of leaving instead”. In other words, it’s a declaration of collective sovereignty- that is, just as libertarians say that a man should be free to do what he likes on his land, a collective should be free to do what they like on theris, and just as libertarians say that “if you don’t like my rules on my private land, leave”, a collective can say the same for their land. It’s a very tricky argument to knock down.

So I lay there in bed last night trying to figure out a killer argument, and then it dawned on me that maybe I was looking at it the wrong way. Maybe it’s an argument that can’t be beaten because it is correct!

Britain is an unrestrained, total democracy (I know, ignore the EU for now). The parliament is sovereign. It can make any law it cares to make; it could order the organised extermination of fat people, or that we may not wear shoes on tuesdays, or that everybody must attend archery practice on sundays. The parliament itself is freely elected by the populace. We may thus choose any lawmakers we like, and thus any laws. We could freely elect a communist regime, or a minarchist regime, or the Monster Raving Loony Party, and so long as the democratic system remains, we can fairly and honestly say that those representatives are in power by the will of the people. One might argue that the electoral system is unjust- but again if we so desired we could elect a parliament to introduce a new electoral system. I could stand for parliament on a platform of introducing Proportional Representation, or a system of TV phone-ins in which the best ballroom dancers get to be our leaders, like Strictly Come Dancing, and people could vote for that, and nobody could stop that system being introduced. Those of us who don’t like the current laws and parliamentary system are free to moan about it, and to attempt to change the minds of our fellows. Nobody is stopping Britain being a minarchy, except the people who live here who, by not voting for one, clearly don’t want it.

And if anybody doesn’t like that, they can leave.

Now we can also look at this from a Libertarian property rights perspective. In a libertarian society, people are entitled to associate and form whatever collectives they wish. If Farmer Giles and Farmer Brown wish to, they could combine their land collectively, and bring in some rules about how they will both behave on that land, and how resources will be allocated, and so on. Perhaps many farmers might choose to do that. If they do that, they now have what is basically a little nation state with a social contract, with laws which people must obey. They may be on private land, but they are now a state, to all intents and purposes. They are the collective owners of their little land. And no libertarian could stand in their way regarding doing that. And if other people ask to live there, they are accepting that social contract, and if their children don’t like it, they can change it or they can leave. It’s entirely fair and reasonable.

Now even if we stick at this point, this does not repudiate libertarianism. When libertarians promote the idea of a libertarian Britain, we are basically arguing for a new social contract with few rules, that is all, just as any other political movement is arguing for a different social contract. We are not repudiating the existence of Britain (even anarcho-capitalists seem to accept their system will be within some kind of national boundaries). I have seen some collectivists argue that libertarians have no right to promote our viewpoint, because “we, the collective, don’t want it”. That is of course ridiculous; anyone may ask for a rule change and try to persuade the rest of the collective to adopt it. But unfortunately, having already typed a great deal, I still haven’t undermined the social contract idea at all. In fact, I’ve accepted it. Is liberty doomed?

Well, no. It’s all in that second part, the “if you don’t like it, you can leave” bit.

If we go back to our jolly farmers example, something we might note is that their collective is defined geographically. They have combined their property. Likewise, nation states are defined geographically. The collectivist is defining his collective as a commmon area of land, within which the collective has absolute power. The members of the collective therefore must be seen as joint property owners of the land. The land of Britain is jointly owned by its sixty million residents. This is explicit in the concept of public property- all that land owned by the “public”- the parks and waterways and government property and so on, is owned by the people. Furthermore, many of the residents explicitly own land within the nation’s borders. They have property rights.

So here’s the thing. If we ask somebody who doesn’t like it to leave, we are forcing them to leave their land behind. Consider the Scots. Suppose that the Scots, as a group, decide that they no longer want to be part of the British collective. The Scots collective owns a great deal of land- callled Scotland. Clearly, if they wish to leave Britain, they cannot be forced to vacate that land. It’s theirs. Rather, Scotland- the land which comprises Scotland- would secede from the Union with the people upon it.

If the collective is defined geographically, then quitting the collective must be a geographical act too.

But then we must say, what is special about the Scots collective? The same must apply to the people of Fife- Fife too must be free to secede. But why stop at Fife? There is no reason. Dunfermline, too has a right to secede. So too does Dunfermline High Street. Then, obviously, we get down to the individual, and say that Mr Angus McSporran, 23 High Street Dunfermline, if he wishes to no longer participate in the collective, has a right to secede from it while staying where he is geographically. That is, the land his house is on has the right to quit Britain, and Mr McSporran and his family within it.

Now we then look at those who own no specific property. They have no land to secede. But, we have established that each individual is a part owner of the public land of Britain. The seceding citizen therefore certainly has a claim to some sixty millionth part of that public land. (Or in practical terms, he may buy some land and then secede thereupon).

Now the collectivist may say “ah hahh- you can’t do that. The rules of the collective prohibit withdrawal of land from it”. But if that is the case, then the collectivist justification- that every citizen is a voluntary member of the collective with the right to leave- falls apart. They are now being coerced. It can no longer be argued that they are “here of their own free will”, because their land is being held hostage to enforce their continued cooperation. And if the collectivist instead argues that the collective is not geographic, but based on people- well, they can’t do that. The nation is a land area. That is unavoidable.

So my conclusion is; the collectivist social contract argument is valid so long as abitrary secession is allowed. Since there is no nation state on Earth that allows arbitrary secession, we can conclude that no nation state is a voluntary social contract. It’s all down to that word “leave”. A person trying to escape the state has to physically remove themself from a static geographical area, whereas leaving can only be consistently defined with the rest of the premise as withdrawing one’s land- just as if Farmer Giles wanted to withdraw from the farm collective, he would not be evicted from his farm, but instead withdraw the farm itself.

Whether your average progressive collectivist will accept this argument is another matter of course, but it seems to me to be logically consistent, and show a logical inconsistency in the social contract justification. Comments?

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As an aside, we could as libertarians consider the ramifications of this perspective. If arbitrary secession were allowed by nation states, libertarianism would be easily attained. We could all just opt out of the system, literally. Buy some land (a hundred square miles of Yorkshire, say) and declare it no longer part of Britain. Sure, we’d lose the joy of the NHS and random searches by the police. Britain could impose arbitrary sanctions upon us. But such an enclave could be internally free, with businesses to attract the poor benighted Brits across the border for a bit of state-free leisure etc. It seems reasonable to suspect that arbitrary secession would lead to a rapid collapse of the miserable collectivist states. Which is why they don’t allow it, of course.

But while they refuse to allow it, there is no voluntary social contract, and thus the power of those states is not legitimate, but justified purely by overwhelming force.