Over the course of the early 20th century, unions got laws passed that violate the rights of employers, in order to give themselves enormous leverage over every capital-intensive work site where a large number of workers concentrate, and they attained a complete stranglehold over all major industries by the 1950s, and all the while, they've had the public at large convinced that they're the underdog.
I think you should do a little research to get a basic familiarity with what labor laws relating to union action prohibit. You'll find that they blatantly violate the contracting rights of employers.
Snickering at me while being unaware of such a basic fact is deplorable.
What is a "contracting right"? A quick search doesn't bring it up as legal terminology, so I'm thinking it's somewhere between generic libertarian and freeman-of-the-land level nonsense, but I welcome a less ridiculous explanation.
If you aren't far libertarian, the government exists specifically to limit what people can contract to do. Unless you consider a government to be nothing more than a contract-enforcement entity (and even then, it is in some sense implied by there being contracts that the government would refuse to enforce).
Further, describing a constitutional law as a violation of rights is in a sense a reverse tautology. It is by definition not a violation of anyone's rights, unless you believe that the US legal system is in some sense unjust, in which case I'm very, very curious to know in what way US law is unfair to employers.
Freedom of contract is a basic prequisite of a free society. It's a subset of free association.
>Unless you consider a government to be nothing more than a contract-enforcement entity
In a free society the government exists only to restrict action in order to protect rights, which extends to the rights one gains through contracts, and to administer public goods for the public benefit.
In a free society the government does not restrict the right of two consenting adults to engage in a mutually voluntary interaction.
There's absolutely no excuse for laws that restrict the right of someone to offer employment terms that reserve the right to fire someone for unionizing or going on a strike.
>Further, describing a constitutional law as a violation of rights is in a sense a reverse tautology.
That's a disingenuous appeal to legality. Law does not confer moral legitimacy.
There absolutely is: an imbalance of power between the two groups contracting. There are practically no situations where contracts are unrestricted. Healthcare, labor, and housing (rentals) all restrict what the provider can do.
Freedom to contract that you describe is not commonly considered ethical. While you're correct that law does not on its own confer moral legitimacy, you can usually find some jurisdiction that does something. There aren't any that provide complete freedom to contract. It's a highly fringe anarcho-liberetarian position vthat leads to exploration.
Existing violations of the freedom of contract are due to popular misconceptions and common tropes like the idea that two people of unequal power cannot arrived at a genuinely consensual agreement. First of all a court will throw out any contract which is not genuinely consensual. Second, balance of power is irrelevant for a mutually agreed contract. Powerful companies compete with each just as much as they compete with workers.
Powerful employers therefore neutralize each other's power because they are competing for the same pool of workers.
A powerful corporation has no power to compel someone to agree to an employment contract that is not the best one on the market just as a powerful corporation has no power to compel someone to buy a product that is not the best one on the market.
>>There aren't any that provide complete freedom to contract.
That's an appeal to popularism. 300 years ago a slavery supporter could say the same about slavery.
>>It's a highly fringe anarcho-liberetarian position vthat leads to exploration.
There is no evidence at all that it leads to exploitation and name-calling basic principles of justice doesn't make them go away. Two consenting adults have every right in the world to enter into any agreement they want as long as it is mutually voluntary as judged by a competent court. Cookie cutter rules that generalize entire classes of interaction as non-consensual don't cut it. They are crude interventions that are based on popular misconceptions.
> First of all a court will throw out any contract which is not genuinely consensual.
Sure, and minimum wage and fair housing laws are simply legal shortcuts to abbreviate arguments about non-genuinely-consentual contracts.
> Second, balance of power is irrelevant for a mutually agreed contract. Powerful companies compete with each just as much as they compete with workers.
This is naive. Certainly in markets where demand outstrips supply this is true, but for markets where supply is smaller than the demand (housing, jobs, healthcare, you see a pattern?) there's little need for suppliers to compete with each other, except at the very top of the market.
Put it simply, if I can pay you $3.00 or $15.00, and make a profit either way, I'll choose to pay you $3.00, and there are markets where that is absolutely possible.
> That's an appeal to popularism. 300 years ago a slavery supporter could say the same about slavery.
No, there have always been some jurisdictions where slavery was outlawed. I'm saying that there are zero jurisdictions with an unrestricted "freedom of contract". In other words, literally no governing body recognizes such a freedom, anywhere in the world.
> There is no evidence at all that it leads to exploitation and name-calling basic principles of justice
Calling a position fringe has exactly as much merit (actually more, since its based on evidence that no one recognizes it) than calling it a "basic principle of justice". You're essentially claiming that there are no just governments anywhere, which is indeed your prerogative (and I might be inclined to agree although for vastly different reasons), but you have yet to justify why your world is more just. Below I outline why why I believe your world would increase homelessness and exploitation of lower class working people at the hands of employers and landlords, as one example. I claim that is less just than the world we currently inhabit. The onus is now on you to either explain why more exploitation is more just, or why it won't occur.
> Two consenting adults have every right in the world to enter into any agreement they want as long as it is mutually voluntary as judged by a competent court.
The assumption here is that the person with the lesser power will be able to successfully win in court quickly and cheaply enough to make a court case worth it. That's an assumption that doesn't hold out in practice and makes these legal shortcuts necessary to prevent. It relies on a basic level of safety: an income to sustain yourself, a place to live, at a minimum. When adjudicating a contract with the provider of your income or your home, you risk abuse at the hand of them. You also need to know your rights and responsibilities, and have some way of ensuring your continued safety in the meantime. That's not possible when you're taking an adversarial relationship with someone who could make you homeless. Even if (and that's an if) a court eventually finds them to have acted in bad faith, you're still homeless. You lose relatively more.
>>to abbreviate arguments about non-genuinely-consentual contracts.
They're over-generalizations. There is no way all work arrangements that pay below the mandated minimum would be thrown out by a court as non-consensual for example. Same with tenancy agreements that don't meet so-called fair standards.
>>Certainly in markets where demand outstrips supply this is true, but for markets where supply is smaller than the demand (housing, jobs, healthcare, you see a pattern?) there's little need for suppliers to compete with each other, except at the very top of the market.
That's not how supply and demand works. There is always demand for labor at a low enough price point. That's why minimum wage increases unemployment and reduces employment growth when it rises above market wages. It makes it illegal to satisfy demand that what otherwise exist at certain price points.
No economist worth their salt would claim that at certain supply demand ratios, competition doesn't exist.
>>Put it simply, if I can pay you $3.00 or $15.00, and make a profit either way, I'll choose to pay you $3.00, and there are markets where that is absolutely possible.
Of course.. But that in no way implies employers aren't in competition with each other. You're just naively assuming that low wages is an indication of employers having no competition, when in reality means the level of capital is low.
If in your scenario, I can pay you $3, it's in society's interest I do that and reinvest the rest to increase capital concentrations that are the source of all wage growth, or to hire 5 workers instead of one.
And this isn't merely theoretical. If in Bangladesh, a minimum wage of $15/hour were instituted, it would outlaw huge swathes of voluntary employment contracts, and would devastate people's economic lives.
Again, basic economics.
>>No, there have always been some jurisdictions where slavery was outlawed.
No there hasn't. Slavery was a universal institution for much of human history.
>>Below I outline why why I believe your world would increase homelessness and exploitation of lower class working people at the hands of employers and landlords, as one example.
Your exploitation arguments are basic on common fallacies held by those without an understanding of economics.
>>Calling a position fringe has exactly as much merit (actually more, since its based on evidence that no one recognizes it) than calling it a "basic principle of justice".
It's a basic principle of justice because once you strip away ideological rationalizations and appeals to legal conventions, almost anyone would acknowledge that forbidding two adults from partaking in an interaction they both genuinely consent to a totalitarian infringement of their rights.
>>The assumption here is that the person with the lesser power will be able to successfully win in court quickly and cheaply enough to make a court case worth it.
First of all, that's something the government can directly address, rather than social activists using it as an excuse to institute cookie cutter rules, and second litigation naturally balance is this because the more powerful party has more assets that can be confiscated by courts. Lawyers will represent under resourced parties for free because they can earn a commission on whatever the suit wins.
> If in your scenario, I can pay you $3, it's in society's interest I do that and reinvest the rest to increase capital concentrations that are the source of all wage growth, or to hire 5 workers instead of one.
You're assumption is that I'll reinvest the rest into the company, instead of just pocketing the difference myself. If I can sustain myself comfortably pocketing the difference, why re-invest the rest. You're assuming certain incentive structures that don't always exist in the real world.
> No there hasn't. Slavery was a universal institution for much of human history.
Near universal, not universal.
> And this isn't merely theoretical. If in Bangladesh, a minimum wage of $15/hour were instituted, it would outlaw huge swathes of voluntary employment contracts, and would devastate people's economic lives.
Yes and? That isn't relevant to any argument I'm making. I agree that the specific regulations of what contracts can/cannot permit may not all be universal. That doesn't mean that some provisions cannot be universal. As a simple example, a contract between two consenting parties that contracts one to commit a crime on behalf of the other in return for some payment should be universally void, despite both parties consenting. That doesn't require that the list of crimes be universal across jurisdictions. Only that the principle: "A contract between two consenting groups that requires one to act criminally is invalid."
> almost anyone would acknowledge that forbidding two adults from partaking in an interaction they both genuinely consent to a totalitarian infringement of their rights.
Leaving aside my personal opinions on any of these issues, I disagree that this opinion is anywhere near common. There are acts that society considers it okay (and perhaps ethical) to prevent a single person from doing (suicide), and where it is often criminal to help someone (physician-assisted suicide). There are all sorts of acts that all kinds of people want to have the government prevent two consenting people from partaking in (marriage if you're not straight, all kinds of kinks). Currently, some of these things are legal and some are not. "Once you strip away ideological rationalizations" is doing a lot of work for you there. What you're claiming is that "once you strip away <ideological systems with which I disagree> almost anyone would acknowledge <the validity of my preferred ideological system>." Which is vacuous. You have to justify why your system is superior to the others, you can't do that by ignoring them. What makes the world better if we replace a "totalitarian" government, over which I maintain the ability to influence, with a totalitarian corporation whom I can exert no control over? Either explain why that is more just, or why it won't happen.
> Your exploitation arguments are basic on common fallacies held by those without an understanding of economics.
Yet you've not actually addressed them. If you understanding of economics is superior, it should be straightforward to correct me.
> First of all, that's something the government can directly address
They do, by streamlining certain court cases and making particular contract provisions explicitly illegal. You just dislike their solution.
> Lawyers will represent under resourced parties for free because they can earn a commission on whatever the suit wins.
Sometimes, the law isn't perfect. This is especially true if you allow the empowered group to write contracts which include stipulations to, for example, cap their own liability, or require arbitration outside of the court. Things that the empowered group is more free to do under your proposal.
To circle back to the beginning of this conversation, in the US, the freedom of contract you describe is not recognized. So your original claim, that "unions got laws passed that violate the rights of employers" is untrue: the right is not and has not ever been recognized. It is not enshrined anywhere, it cannot be violated because it does not, within our jurisdiction, exist. You can argue that it perhaps should be a right, but it is not widely recognized as one.
>>You're assumption is that I'll reinvest the rest into the company, instead of just pocketing the difference myself. If I can sustain myself comfortably pocketing the difference, why re-invest the rest.
And that's fine too. The $12 profit is appropriate compensation for the person investing their capital into a capital starved sector of the economy. That compensation is incentive for others to invest in that sector.
Self-interest will drive many to reinvest that profit, because profit margins that good are hard to pass up, and don't last forever.
>>Near universal, not universal.
You are idealizing the past. Slavery was totally and utterly commonplace before the emergence of humanistic theological traditions.
>>That doesn't mean that some provisions cannot be universal. As a simple example, a contract between two consenting parties that contracts one to commit a crime on behalf of the other in return for some payment should be universally void, despite both parties consenting.
That is not consensual. Just as you cannot personally violate someone else's rights by depriving them of their property or damaging their person without their consent, you cannot collaborate with someone else to do so. Any contract formed toward that end is an act toward a commission of a violation of someone's rights, and thus appropriately prohibited.
No mutually voluntary contract falls in this category, and thus your example is inapplicable.
>>Leaving aside my personal opinions on any of these issues, I disagree that this opinion is anywhere near common.
I think anyone who's grown up with Western ideals would consider a third party interfering with a consensual interaction between two adults to infantilize and patronize one or both counter-parties and to be a totalitarian imposition.
That's why courts would rule all such contracts valid in the absence of legislative limitations on the freedom of contract. Courts with juries of one's peers which get an opportunity to deliberate on issues are the best arbitrator of justice and most accurate reflection of people's genuine beliefs on the issues.
>>Yet you've not actually addressed them
I have, a number of times. See my point about the 'fair' wage level and the existence of competition at any capital to labor ratio.
The fact that you're making these assertions at all, when they are so unscientific, is irresponsible.
>>They do, by streamlining certain court cases and making particular contract provisions explicitly illegal.
Blanket judgements based on crude generalization are not directly addressing the issue of less resourced parties being at a disadvantage in legal battles.
The issue is the legal disadvantage that less resourced parties face, which has to be addressed by more resources going towards legal counselling and representation for less resourced parties.
>>This is especially true if you allow the empowered group to write contracts which include stipulations to, for example, cap their own liability, or require arbitration outside of the court. Things that the empowered group is more free to do under your proposal.
If the less powerful party provides genuine consent to such a provision, then it's no one else's business. They agreed to those circumstances.
>To circle back to the beginning of this conversation, in the US, the freedom of contract you describe is not recognized
And to circle back to my first point, anti-free-market pro-union ideology is pervasive in the US.
Arguing with libertarians and showing how naive and simplistic their assumptions are is sport for intellectual types in the US.
>>So your original claim, that "unions got laws passed that violate the rights of employers" is untrue: the right is not and has not ever been recognized.
Just like slavery didn't violate anyone's rights 300 years? Just because something isn't recognized by the law doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
> And that's fine too. The $12 profit is appropriate compensation for the person investing their capital into a capital starved sector of the economy. That compensation is incentive for others to invest in that sector.
This doesn't address the imbalance of power between the job seeker and the job provider. The job seeker is still at a disadvantage in the relationship. We're talking externalities, not the efficiency of supply and demand in a perfectly efficient market. I reject the notion that such a market exists.
> Any contract formed toward that end is an act toward a commission of a violation of someone's rights, and thus appropriately prohibited.
There are crimes that don't involve the violation of anyone's rights. Such contracts should still be invalid.
> If the less powerful party provides genuine consent to such a provision, then it's no one else's business. They agreed to those circumstances.
And are now unable to seek retribution for additional damages. You're arguing for the ability to sign legal protections away.
> Blanket judgements based on crude generalization are not directly addressing the issue of less resourced parties being at a disadvantage in legal battles.
Then provide a more direct solution.
> The issue is the legal disadvantage that less resourced parties face, which has to be addressed by more resources going towards legal representation for less resourced parties.
This is a start, but doesn't address the potential loss of livelyhood. It also doesn't address the potential for abuse at the contract negotiation process. If you're going to propose something like everyone getting free, government provided legal aid and some form of basic income, sure that might address all of my issues, but I have a feeling you wouldn't appreciate the taxes required to maintain such a system.
> I think anyone who's grown up with Western ideals would consider a third party interfering with a consensual interaction between two adults to be a totalitarian imposition that infantilizes and patronizes one or both counter-parties.
And yet I just gave a laundry list of counterexamples. Repeating utterly untrue statements doesn't lend them more legitimacy, it just makes you look out of touch. Which, to be clear, you are.
The US is, compared to most of the western world, far more anti-union, and anti-union ideology is more pervasive here than in most western nations. The right to act without government intervention to the extent you hold it is a fringe view, and is not something that most people support. And there's good reason for that:
> Just like slavery didn't violate anyone's rights 300 years?
> If the less powerful party provides genuine consent to such a provision, then it's no one else's business. They agreed to those circumstances.
Your proposed system would allow people to sign themselves into slavery. Stop trying to argue that slavery was some unjust evil, when you're simultaneously arguing for a system that would allow slavery. You can't have it both ways. Either slavery (or perhaps indentured servitude, since that was often consensual) didn't violate people's rights back in the day, or your proposed legal framework, which would allow people to sign themselves over as slaves, would! Which is it?
>>The job seeker is still at a disadvantage in the relationship.
They are not at a disadvantage. Whether the job seeker is dealing with a small business looking to hire someone, or a large corporation looking to hire someone, they have the same power to walk away if the job offerer doesn't offer the best terms on the market.
It's as simple as that. You're getting stuck on some trope about "imbalance of power" and are not dealing with the simple reality that in a free market, the only power someone has over another is to offer them a better deal than the next best offer on the market.
That is not exploitation, or abuse or anything else that we need to violate the freedom of contract for.
>>There are crimes that don't involve the violation of anyone's rights.
Nothing that doesn't involve the violation of anyone's rights should be a crime.
>>You're arguing for the ability to sign legal protections away.
Yes I'm arguing that people should be free to make their judgments on what offer to accept. We don't need to deny people the right to offer terms because we assume that others lack the judgment to decide for themselves whether those terms are in their interest.
>>Then provide a more direct solution.
I did: provide more resources for legal representation for less-resourced parties.
>>This is a start, but doesn't address the potential loss of livelyhood.
It does, because a strong enough case of contract violation will allow legal firms to pay the wronged party living costs on the expectation that the defendant will need to cover those costs at a later date.
>>It also doesn't address the potential for abuse at the contract negotiation process.
And your solution doesn't address the vast swathes of mutually beneficial contracts that are prohibited by your cookie-cutter restrictions.
Problems should be addressed on a case-by-case basis, through court proceedings that weigh the facts of each case. Cookie cutter rules that generalize entire classes of ostensibly mutually voluntary interactions as "involuntary", based on ridiculuos equations like "unequal power leads to unfair contracts" are not justice. They are not good government. They are not reasonable laws.
>> some form of basic income
No thank you. No universal welfare extracted through pain of imprisonment from those producing value.
>>And yet I just gave a laundry list of counterexamples.
I refuted every one of your examples.
>>Repeating utterly untrue statements doesn't lend them more legitimacy, it just makes you look out of touch. Which, to be clear, you are.
Any reasonable person would view a third party forcibly interfering and preventing a mutually voluntary interaction between two consenting adults as patronizing, and totalitarian. That's a fact that's clear once you strip away political partisanship, appeals to legality and ideological rationalizations.
You're just in denial that the ideology you bet the farm on is, like all ideologies, wrong.
>>Your proposed system would allow people to sign themselves into slavery.
No. No court would allow that under common law. A court would find an argument that what a person agreed to a decade earlier cannot bind the person they are in the present, because the two people are not in effect the same person, as reasonable.
Like I said: arguing with libertarians and showing how naive and simplistic their assumptions are is sport for intellectual types in the US. You're a typical example of that.
> No. No court would allow that under common law. A court would find an argument that what a person agreed to a decade earlier cannot bind the person they are in the present, because the two people are not in effect the same person, as reasonable.
So you're saying that a blanket rule to make contracts that involve selling ones-self into slavery makes sense? Or that there are certain circumstances in which selling oneself into slavery is alright, and so it should be adjudicated by the court on a case by case basis?
How even could someone who is a slave (and therefore likely limited in their movements) petition a court?
> A court would find an argument that what a person agreed to a decade earlier cannot bind the person they are in the present
People sign contracts for more than 10 years all the time (mortgages, as an example). You saying we can just back out of those?
>>So you're saying that a blanket rule to make contracts that involve selling ones-self into slavery makes sense? Or that there are certain circumstances in which selling oneself into slavery is alright, and so it should be adjudicated by the court on a case by case basis?
If courts rule that selling oneself into slavery is in all circumstances non-consensual, then there's no problem at all with codifying that with a statute. This would never be the case with minimum wage or 'fair' housing laws.
Courts would absolutely find numerous if not almost all instances of such interactions as consensual.
>>How even could someone who is a slave (and therefore likely limited in their movements) petition a court?
The slavery is a private relationship, not one that is relevant to the court. The government doesn't deperson someone just because they enter into a slavery agreement with another party. The court would accept petitions from all legal persons.
>>People sign contracts for more than 10 years all the time (mortgages, as an example). You saying we can just back out of those?
Mortgage contracts govern property, not people. One has a right to give property away. One doesn't have a right to give their future self away.
> One doesn't have a right to give their future self away.
This contradicts what you said earlier, which is that you should be able to sign away legal protections in a contact.
It seems we agree on one point: there are some rights you cannot sign away, and it is the government's responsibility to intervene in such a situation. You draw that line at somewhere around slavery. I simply draw the line elsewhere.
We're both willing to violate your previously involiable right to contract. If you truly believed it were involiable, you would respect a person's right to sign themselves into slavery or indentured servitude. There are situations where one might be willing to make such a decision: to save a loved one, perhaps.
But you've said that such a contract could be voided, even if at the time of signing the parties consented.
We both agree that there should be limits on the right to contract, much as there are limits on most other rights. I simply claim that the line should be drawn differently than where you believe it should be.
>>This contradicts what you said earlier, which is that you should be able to sign away legal protections in a contact.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to sign away "legal protections", which is a vague term that has a very subjective meaning based on one's perspective on a particular contract.
I said that one shouldn't be able to sign away someone else's rights. I think a court would find that selling one's future self into slavery falls into this category.
You can't just blur the distinction between these two very different things and claim that I'm indirectly supporting one by supporting the other.
>>We're both willing to violate your previously involiable right to contract.
The right to contract doesn't need to be violated to end selling one's self into slavery. All that needs to happen is that a court find that in the future self is not the same person as the present self.
Unlike you I want these determinations to be made by courts of law not by very ill-informed and ideologically motivated social activists who are not carefully weighing the evidence of each case.
Claiming that selling ones self into slavery and accepting a lease agreement that says the property owner is not obligated to keep renting to you at the same price after 1 year are equally easy to make a blanket judgment about not being consensual, is disingenous.
And with regard to the very extreme scenario of the former; I'm not even saying we should make a blanket judgment about that at the legislative level. I'm saying that the courts should judge that and only if they determine that all cases of this situation are non-consensual, should a law be made to ban it.
So we have very differing views on this, despite the superficial similarities you pointed out, and which are only similarities when viewed out of context.
>>We both agree that there should be limits on the right to contract
Wrong, the right to contract does not allow violating other people's rights. Violating someone else's rights is non-contractual. I oppose an agreement to sell oneself into slavery only insofar as a court after careful and considered deliberations has determined that it is a violation of a party's rights, and thus not a fully consensual/contractual interaction.
You are not willing to make that leap and say that only courts should be making these determinations because only courts do the deliberation needed to competently judge these very complex matters. Because if you did make that leap then you would have to admit that you're a Libertarian and that left-wing ideology does not work. And you are not willing to do that.
You're relying on literal freeman-of-the-land nonsense at this point. For a judge to conclude that you-in-a-decade is a different person than you-now, the law would have to allow that possibility. Our current laws don't. Your proposed legal system would.
In other words, your proposed legal system would prevent someone from signing over some rights to their future self. Your ethical reasoning behind this choice is irrelevant. The mechanics of your proposed laws would make certain contracts void.
As I've said before, courts cannot make decisions in a vacuum. They need laws to rule based on. The laws that would need to exist to enable the system you want in practice restrict the freedom to contract that you claim to leave unrestricted.
You try to avoid this contradiction by wrapping it up in the idea that you can be a different person in ten years, but current laws don't recognize that, and the only reason you'd need such a law is to resolve this contradiction without explicitly limiting the contract. It's transparent. I expect I could find more contradictions, but you'd similarly attempt special pleading for those cases.
>>You're relying on literal freeman-of-the-land nonsense at this point. For a judge to conclude that you-in-a-decade is a different person than you-now, the law would have to allow that possibility. Our current laws don't. Your proposed legal system would.
No, that is not how common law works. Common law holds consent as a core principle of contract law. Courts take all manner of factors into consideration in determining whether parties gave consent.
Courts will most certainly consider the genuity of the consent a person gave 10 years prior to being foribly confined and made to labor for another.
You're using ideologically extremism and bigotry with your "free man of the land" nonsense accusation, which is intended to belittle and delegitimize me, and avoid contending with my point on its own merits.
>>They need laws to rule based on.
That is not how commom law works. Commom law is based on existing statutes and legal precedent. In the absence of the former, the latter suffices. Contract law in particular is based almost exclusively on common law.
>>You try to avoid this contradiction by wrapping it up in the idea that you can be a different person in ten years, but current laws don't recognize that
The argument has never been tested in court. I'm suggesting the argument would be accepted by a court, and you've provided no reason to believe it wouldn't.
Precedent is against you, however: you cannot claim to be a different person under current common law. To overrule the existing precedent, you would need a new law, which is what I said.
> Courts will most certainly consider the genuity of the consent a person gave 10 years prior to being foribly confined and made to labor for another.
In the hypothetical, we've already agreed that the consent given was genuine. The question isn't whether or not the consent was genuine, the answer to that is a resounding "yes". The question is "is the person now, 10 years later, a different person such that their prior genuine consent no longer applies"? This question can be rephrased as "Is there a way to re-invent myself as a new legal being and avoid prior obligations and agreements at no consequence to myself?" They are in fact the same question. And courts time and time again have resoundingly answered that question with a no. A group that consistently tries to argue otherwise is freemen of the land. Hence me throwing you in with them, because you're using their (nonsense) arguments. Thankfully we've seen them try those arguments in court before, and they never win.
> I'm suggesting the argument would be accepted by a court, and you've provided no reason to believe it wouldn't.
Let me just repeat that last bit: these arguments have been tried, by the freemen of the land whose comparison you so resent. They never win. Courts have tested and failed these arguments because they are bad arguments.
You have not shown that precedent is against me. Where has this argument been tested and rejected?
>>The question isn't whether or not the consent was genuine, the answer to that is a resounding "yes". The question is "is the person now, 10 years later, a different person such that their prior genuine consent no longer applies"
That goes to the question of whethee the consent was genuine. Consent is not genuine when it is provided on behalf of another party.
>>This question can be rephrased as "Is there a way to re-invent myself as a new legal being and avoid prior obligations and agreements at no consequence to myself?"
A disingenuous leading construction of the question..
And being considered a different person does not allow one to avoid all obligations and agreements that their pass self entered into. All property bounded by past agreements would still be bound, and the vast majority of agreements use property as collateral to compel compliance.
Only self-imposed slavery would be nullified by such an affirmative response to the question.
This has nothing to do with your "freemen-of-the-land" nonsense accusation.
I'd be open to seeing a single court case where someone used the "they are not their past self" argument to get out of their legal obligations.
