Social contract
“The lex fundamentalis of natural law is the duty of every man, so far as in him lies, to strive that the welfare of human society in general be secured and maintained”[1] They include duties toward their Creator, toward themselves and toward other men who are entitled to the same rights and duties including the duty to our fellow-men to promote as far as possible the advantage of others. law
This itemization is of the absolute duties of the individual to his equals. There are also conditional duties, which “arise from engagements or agreements, from the mere use of language, of oaths, of acquisition of ownership, and of bona fide ownerships; … to contracts, to the dissolution of obligations to which agreement has been made, and to the method of interpretation of agreements and laws. All these things, however, as stated, are treated only from the standpoint of the individual in his relation to other individuals or rather to society; of the state or even of the association of states we hear nothing.”Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; refs with no name must have content
None of these duties are associated with the state because our rights are endowed by nature and nature's God. The foundation of all liberty is established in a state of nature “status naturalis, wherein there was only a dependence upon God and society had not yet been constituted into a state.”[2]
Society and state are not the same thing. They may merge by those same elements that “arise from engagements or agreements...” imposing conditional duties but it begins through individual consent or acquiescent. Government is even a more general term. When the people are in a state of nature as God intended, their government is one of, for and by the people.[3] When man entrusts his duties and obligations along with their correlative rights to others then you have government by the state. When individuals enter into civil society by membership through those engagements or agreements with the state there is a binding of the people into a social compact.
The “social contract, agreement, or covenant by which men are said to have abandoned the ‘state of nature’ to form the society in which they now live.... Assumes that men at first lived in a state of anarchy where there was no society, no government, and no organized coercion of the individual by the group… by the social contract men had surrendered their natural liberties in order to enjoy the order and safety of the organized state.” [4]
This is done often at the cost of liberty. From You Keep Using That Word? Part 2 - Faith
"Religion comes from the Latin meaning to bind. The religion of society will determine the state of society. The religion of Christ binds the people by charity and love. Civil religion is the result of a social contract. When welfare of society is provided by the sword of the State, pure religion is murdered and liberty dies. An authoritarian bureaucracy of the State becomes the new ministers and priests http://www.preparingyou.com/wiki/skins/common/images/button_headline.pngof society. All who take by that sword will perish under that sword."
"“Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.”[5] Individual rights given by God and the privileged power of government granted by men have been at war since Cain killed Able. “State is an end and individual is means to this end or state is means and individual is end in itself.”[6] The State’s duties never venture into the redistribution of wealth in a moral society because man was not endowed with the right to take from from his brother."
"“Redistribution is immoral... it allows one person to treat another as no more than a means...”[7] The welfare state is the enemy of religion.[8] When pure religion diminishes, socialism flourishes."
Some people through social compact give the state the power to take from its members for the welfare of society. That power has been deemed a foolish rejection of God.[9] “It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.”[10] “All socialism involves slavery”[11] “Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion”[12]
“I will never live for the sake of another man or ask another man to live for mine”[13]
We must learn to distinguish between charity and socialism. Charity is good, socialism is evil. (Pr. 14:30, 31, 19:17) Charity is for the helpless poor while [the socialist's] welfare makes the poor helpless. (Ga. 2:10)”[14] The Higher Liberty
What You Bind on Earth
How does a government get its power and authority?
“Good government is no substitute for self-government.” Gandhi, Mahatma
Some take the belief too far that the “The State ... is a social institution forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group ... [for] no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.”[15]
But no such government would bind man because “Those captured by pirates and robbers remain free.”[16] For the simple reason that “Things captured by pirates and robbers do not change ownership.”[17] Governments obtain power and men become bound to obey those institutions on earth, for numerous reasons, which are almost all based in consent in one form or another.
It would be binding for those who “take any oath of allegiance to the Government thereof”.[18] It would be binding for those who sign a social compact. It would also be binding if people apply and receive benefits because “He who receives the benefit should also bear the disadvantage.”[19] The binding is even more complete if the people take the benefit at the expense of others, including your children’s future.
People may desire to claim usurpation or fraud, or failure of full disclosure but these self serving mantras will likely fall on deaf ears with volumes of public records to the contrary. This binding is based on constructive social contracts, well publicized and no one who takes a benefit can deny the reciprocating obligations.
The “social contract, agreement, or covenant by which men are said to have abandoned the ‘state of nature’ to form the society in which they now live.... Assumes that men at first lived in a state of anarchy where there was no society, no government, and no organized coercion of the individual by the group… by the social contract men had surrendered their natural liberties in order to enjoy the order and safety of the organized state.”[20] This is done at the cost of liberty.
The Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven was the right to be ruled by God. It was not a new government but the original state of nature with no civil or social contract.
Moses had created a nation of people to bring them back to the dominion of God. The people were bound together with a common faith in a supreme being and creator of the world, a common law and a literature that attempted to explain the precepts of that law and its common faith and religion.
Their religion included a means of freewill sacrifice that sustained the needs of their society through that common faith, in the hope and by the charity of the people. They elected titular leaders to minister that government of God without relinquishing any rights granted by God. This peculiar government of the people, served God by the people’s love for one another and no other social contract. The ministers were separate from the people who maintained their status as free souls under God. The people were the state and the Levites, without authority, held all things in common so that the people might be free.
As a people they continuously turned back to those elements and rudiments of the world that had brought them into bondage. The voice of the people elected a king to rule over them, forming a social contract that abandoned the precepts of their faith. He was soon able to take by force their sacrifices, take the first fruits of their labor, the best of their fields, their sons and daughters, make his instruments of war, and bring them back into the bondage of the world.
When the Pharisees elected to invite Rome to secure their government they continued that journey away from God toward Babylon. Upon “... the death of Caesar the Jews of Rome gathered for many nights, waking strange feelings of awe in the city, as they chanted in mournful melodies their Psalms around the pyre on which the body of their benefactor had been burnt, and raised their pathetic dirges.”[21]
Jesus came preaching a kingdom, appointed it and told his titular ministers and ambassadors to not be like the governments of the world that called themselves benefactors but exercised authority one over the other. They were to be that one form of government that led the people back to God.
Just as their are forms of government there are forms of citizenship. Whether a citizen is still a natural inhabitant or has obtained membership in a political society, he has certain rights, although, those rights may differ. The natural inhabitant may be a member of a society or civitas[22],but he remains an individual with civil rights within that general body. Those “Civil rights are such as belong to every citizen of the state or country, or, in a wider sense to all its inhabitants, and are not connected with the organization or the administration of government. They include the rights of property, marriage, protection by laws, freedom of contract, trial by jury, etc.”[23] An individual, who becomes a member or person in a political society, also has civil rights, but the origin of those rights, being political, are rights “pertaining or relating to the policy or administration of government”.[24]
So, “as otherwise defined, civil rights are rights appertaining to a person in virtue of his citizenship in a state or community. Rights capable of being enforced or redressed in civil action. Also a term applied to certain rights secured to citizens of the United States by the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments to the Constitution, and by various acts of Congress made in pursuance thereof.”[25]
The essential difference would seem to be that the former “are not connected with the organization or the administration of government”, while the latter are “subject”.
“It is quite clear then that there is a citizenship of the United States and a citizenship of a State, which are distinct from each other and which depend upon different characteristics or circumstances in the Individual.”[26] “The rights of a citizen under one (state or United States citizenship) may be quite different from those which he has under the other…”[27]
If the benefit of the latter citizenship includes the duty of subjection, then the assent must require a voluntary consent, or else such citizenship would be nothing more than involuntary servitude. There are countless ways of demonstrating the consummation of a voluntary consent.
“The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.” Plutarch 2000 years ago.
From Contracts, Covenants and Constitutions Chapter 9
Footnotes
- ↑ Pufendorf: On the Duty of Man and Citizen: Introduction By Walther Schucking and translated by Herbert F. Wright.
- ↑ ibidem
- ↑ John Wycliffe introduced his translation of the Bible in 1382 with the words, “This Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People.”
- ↑ The Columbia Encyclopedia, Columbia University Press, 1968, p. 1983
- ↑ John Calvin Coolidge, Jr., 1872 – 1933, 30th President of the United States.
- ↑ Natural State, Welfare State or Failed State by T H Shah
- ↑ The Kantian ethic of capitalism. Harold B. Jones, Jr.
- ↑ State Welfare Spending and Religiosity, A Cross National Analysis by Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde
- ↑ Ex. 20:17, 1 Sa. 8; 13:13, Ro. 7:7, 13:9, Col. 3:5, Heb. 13:5, 2 Pe. 2:3-14
- ↑ Frederic Bastiat, 1801 – 1850, French theorist, political economist.
- ↑ Herbert Spencer, 1820 – 1903, an English philosopher.
- ↑ Richard John Neuhaus, 1936 – 2009, prominent American clergyman.
- ↑ Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand. Inscription above Galt’s Gulch powerhouse.
- ↑ Evangelical Bible College of Western Australia Commentary. Revelation by Dr Peter Mose [Book 97-2] July 2004
- ↑ Cf Franz Oppenheimer, Origins of the State, (San Francisco: Fox and Wilkes, 1997), p.15.
- ↑ A pirates et latronibus capti libera permanent.Dig.49. 15. 19. 2.
- ↑ A piratis et latronibus capta dominium non mutant.1 Kent, Comm. 108, 184; 2 Wooddesen, Lect. 258,259.
- ↑ Article II The Jay Treaty, Treaty of Amity Commerce and Navigation Concluded November 19, 1794
- ↑ Cujus est commodum ejus debet esse incommodum
- ↑ The Columbia Encyclopedia, Columbia University Press, 1968, p. 1983
- ↑ Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah Chapt. V
- ↑ Civitas. Any body of people living under the same laws. Black’s 3rd.
- ↑ Right. In Constitutional Law. Black’s Law Dictionary 3rd p. 1559.
- ↑ Political. Black’s Law Dictionary 3rd p. 1375.
- ↑ Right. In Constitutional Law. Black’s Law Dictionary 3rd p. 1559.
- ↑ Slaughter House Cases, 83 US 395, 407 (1873)
- ↑ Colgate v. Harvey, 296 US 404, 429. (1935)