This might as well be heresy or blasphemy. I jettisoned consent of the governed a while back. I think it’s an impossible standard that leads to a kind of gridlock in how to procede when there is a party who withholds their consent to some social system or set of political rules.
Suppose someone says that they never consented to public accommodations laws. Now let’s suppose someone else complains that they never consented to laws against trespass. Public accommodations laws, in addition to requiring an establishment to serve someone regardless of a particular attribute, make refusal to leave an establishment, when that establishment wishes someone to leave because they are of a particular attribute that is protected (i.e., race, sex, etc.), which non-consenting party’s non-consent wins?
I submit that this problem is even more broad and that any arrangement in society a person wishes to be changed constitutes being governed without consent. This then leads to the gridlock I’m talking about: the complainant doesn’t consent to the arrangements supported by everyone else while everyone else doesn’t consent to whatever arrangements that the complainer thinks are the fallback position.
This should be interesting. Are we bumping up against a problem with a republic as a form of government?
Let’s see what Mr. Mason had to say in the Virginia Declaration of Rights:
VI. That elections of members to serve as representatives of the people in assembly ought to be free; and that all men, having sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to, the community have the right of suffrage and cannot be taxed or deprived of their property for public uses without their own consent or that of their representatives so elected, nor bound by any law to which they have not, in like manner, assented, for the public good.
Well, maybe you should define “consent of the governed”?
Where’s the social contract? Are we concerned about property rights now?
I offer to you that public accommodation laws and property rights are diametrically incompatible and that the former is an overreach, an abomination and completely unConstitutional, the Nonumvirate not withstanding.
This is what happens when you give an oligarchy that much power.
I don’t like to talk in terms of rights as if they were fundamental entities. It leads to a lot of tangential discussion that never leads anywhere. I’d prefer to say either that an action should be permitted or not permitted.
I can think of a few cases where one should be able to be on someone else’s property regardless of the owner’s wishes:
Intervening to stop something that is obviously a severe transgression against another person like rape, abuse, or imprisonment.
Running across someone’s land when a person is being persued by another person who is trying to harm them.
Stopping animal abuse that is out in the open, if animal abuse is in fact illegal.
I mean like in the sense of which way I prefer to talk about these things. Rephrasing what you are saying, you are currently not permitted to do several things that you ought to be permitted to do. Is that less problematic than the phrasing you quoted?
Several anarchists I know who only pay their taxes because of a “gun put to their heads” would be surprised by that. Is this what Hume meant about the little lie we like to tell ourselves?
This is where rights come in. They are the things Centgov is not (supposed to be) allowed to make illegal or un-permitted. Let’s stick with permitted - it pisses me off more than legal.
I believe this is the biggest problem we have today. We have entire generations of Americans who believe it is the function of government to “permit” us to do things. And the government invented and promotes it at every turn. It is a beast whose sole purpose is to control and grow.
We go along and go along, mostly because it doesn’t affect “me”. See my posts about banning ARs in the NRA thread.
Until it does.
Smoking is another one. I don’t smoke. It stinks and causes cancer. Who is the government to tell a restaurant owner they are not permitted to have a smoking area in their place? “Permitted”?
My local radio guy was talking about the new law on back up cameras today. Mandatory. For 200 lives a year. If I want one, I can already get one. Now I have to have it - I’m not “permitted” to buy a vehicle without one.
