Do You Owe Your Town Things You Never Agreed To?

You can owe a place and people things that you never agreed to. Um I I will take a very short uh stab and then let you go into more depth. Certainly, I think you can owe some people things that you never agreed to. I think that you uh owe your parents uh certain responsibilities. Uh certainly people that you've brought into the world, your own children, you owe almost infinitely to. Um although I guess you might say you agree to that, but you know, to make it hard, what if your children were accidental? Um but but how about a place? Um I don't know. What do you think? You certainly can. I don't think there's any way around it unless you sort of eliminate the idea of of duty altogether. So, you know, we're talking earlier about uh what's the standard by which you decide is a thing good or bad?

And if you have no standard, then anything's you know, nihilistic view, there's no real basis of anything. Um but can you owe a place and a people things you never agree to? Yeah, none of us uh agreed to come into this world. That's not how it works. You arrive in this world. Um and then the question pretty much devolves just do you owe anybody anything at that point? And it's yes, you do. I'm I I uh I'm a Catholic, I believe in God. Um, so it's easy for me to see that it's not it it seems like a very uh narcissistic and uh uh nihilistic way of looking at things to think I don't owe anybody anything because I didn't ask to be here, something like that. You know, in uh in Christianity and Catholicism, you put God at the center. When you do that, you realize, oh, my what is my existence about then?

It's about service. Okay, it's primarily service to God. Then that devolves to service to the people around me. And so, of course, yeah, you owe people a lot of stuff. You you owe yourself uh to to the people uh around you, and that's a people and a place, I suppose, because you have a people around you and you're in a place. And so I can't really see any way that that wouldn't be uh something I agree to. You owe you can owe a place and a people things you never agreed to. Life uh contains contracts, but life is not a contract. So this is sort of framed as if there's a con. Oh, I never agreed to this. It's like no shit. Um, so yeah, you you you of course owe people things that you never agreed to, for sure. There's an optical illusion, the necker cube, and this is two squares overlapped, and then the diagonals are drawn in.

And the illusion is that you look at it and you can think, oh, this you know, it's sticking out of the page, and then you look at another way and oh, it's sticking into the page. Um and we talked earlier about Keegan levels, and at Keegan 5, basically there's lots of different systems, and you might say that this system is appropriate for measuring this, but this other system is appropriate for another thing. And so where I'm going with this is I'm also Catholic. Um, you know, I'm simultaneously a Catholic and sort of anarcho-capitalist. Um, so I can put on, you know, a squint with my left eye, and I think, yeah, you know, yes, for all the theological reasons you elucidated, you can owe a people in a place uh things, but then I can, you know, squint the other eye and you know say no, and unless I uh signed the contract.

And let me go on a quick side rant. Another problem I have with sort of sophomore libertarians is they often reinvent a legal system from first principles and don't understand all of the issues that our legal system has grappled with over a thousand years. So they'll say, I should be uh totally free to walk into a restaurant, eat at the buffet, and walk out again. I was never presented with a contract. I didn't put my thumbprint or a cryptographic signature on it. And you know, the legal code has grappled with how much stupid overhead there would be if you needed to sign a contract when you walk into a restaurant. And it has come, uh I think it's called like contract by adherence or something, where if you act as if you were doing this contractual thing, and you know, everyone knows you actually are, um, you know, you go into the store, you take the keys, you rent the car.

Uh even if they fail to make you sign the contract, it's not your car, you don't get to keep it. Um, so I both am annoyed at libertarians who say I didn't sign the contract, but also when I squint the other eye, I can you know see the argument. So I don't know. I'm conflicted. Interesting. Well I I didn't quite connect. So I like this kind of idea of like this implied understanding, like implied contract, the whole situation implies it. So that sounds like it still argues in favor of you do owe people things. Right. So they're both pointing the same direction, aren't they? Well, what I what I would say is when you walk into uh a buffet and you pick up a plate, yeah, you are taking affirmative steps to show that you are engaging in the business model they're doing. Yes. So in in the view of life, what you know, and and and so if you didn't, you wouldn't walk in there, you wouldn't take a plate, or you turn around and leave.

Um in life, you you know, someone says, Hey, we're gonna observe you over the next year or two, and then we're going to decide if you have adhered to the contractual idea of being a citizen of New Hampshire. Um, and you would say, Okay, and if I don't like it, you know, if if I don't, what do you expect me to do? Well, leave. Okay, I'll I'll leave across the border in Massachusetts. And someone there says, same exact thing. What can you do if you don't think I I don't want to owe a loyalty to these people? Should you get in a lifeboat and paddle out into the middle of the ocean? Yes. Okay. That that is an argument. That is an argument. Yeah, you you just it it's the condition, it's our condition. I it is comparable. It's part of it's part of being not self-sufficient, actually. We're not self-sufficient.