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.
I am a 27 year old voluntaryist living in beautiful Colorado. For fun, I snowboard and race road bikes in addition to my economics obsession. I love the Austrian school in general and Murray Rothbard in particular. 
Stop filing and paying income tax.
http://www.patriotnetwork.info/
I think the answer to your question is that they don’t think it is that bad of a deal. So they agree to it. There is the appearance of choice in that they could leave the country, but the options don’t seem all that promising. So they concede to the payments without thinking that they have been coerced.
A very apt illustration, but one which we all find ourselves dealing with. I’ve been told by a relative who works for the local municipality that they have in the past seized private residences within one year of non payment of city taxes! The IRS doesn’t work nearly that fast. Seems to me that, at least around these parts, local city governments are more powerful than the federal ones. So much for keeping government power localized – its all based on coercion.
@Rod
There’s a guy who lives here in Grand Rapids who didn’t pay property taxes, and they took his house pretty quick. I’m not sure it was a year, but it might have close to that. Today he sleeps at the door of G.R. City Hall in protest.
I haven’t paid any property taxes since 1993. Of course, I deliberately do not own property. I don’t own real estate, I don’t own a house, and I don’t own a vehicle. No car, no boat, no motorcycle. I don’t have any income. The state can kiss my shiny metal ass.
wood? Wood burns. It also makes a poor barrier against a .50 caliber bullet.
Classical liberalism fails two important tests. First, it fails on consent. Those who run the state don’t care whether they have your consent, as you very clearly show. If consent were required for the state to use force, then unanimous consent would be necessary. Otherwise, it is tyranny. Perhaps tyranny of the majority, depending on whether you trust the plutocrats counting the votes.
Second, it fails on protection. The state was not set up to defend your life, liberty, and property, and anyone who says otherwise is either lying or smoking very good weed. (All you need is a bag of weed.) The state was set up to separate the unwary from their property for the benefit of those who run the state.
Once you get over Rousseau’s dangerous theology about unsigned, undelivered, non-consensual “social” contracts for which there is no exchange of value, you can go back to understanding reality. Which you seem to be doing very well.
Huh. Some of my comment did not make it through:
The typical answer to the one strong man concern is that he has to sleep sometime. Is his house made of wood? Wood burns. It also makes a poor barrier against a .50 caliber bullet.
But, but, but … it’s the Constitution! It has special magical powers, we just haven’t been using it right. Never mind that if it had special magical power it would not have let us misuse it!
Altho it’s not relevant to the main point of the article, the solution to your fictional scenario is to become as strong or more so than the neighbor. In the end it all boils down to strength. We must be strong if we are to prevail. It doesn’t mean we have to use our physical strength. We simply must have it as a deterrent.
It is a sort of idolatry that Americans have about the constitution. In the case of Mormons, I gather they actually believe it was “divinely inspired.”
Every thing made by man can be unmade by man. Every lock and vault that one man can design another can design around.
In the end, the constitution really is just a piece of paper. It won’t stop a bullet.
I rarely think twice about buying another book. Why not buy two security services? Does the fact that I once bought a taxi ride means that I’ll never need another?
seems to me there are two fundamental and opposing axioms that, depending on which you choose, will define how your world is built. the first is the non aggession principle, the second is “might makes right.” the state, no matter what it claims, clearly operates from the second principle.
oh, and yeah, the US considers itself the sovereign owner of all the land (as the public), which is the meaning of eminent domain