July 31 2017
Unbound by Social Contracts Article 8, the “Elastic Clause” does NOT allow Congress to pass any law necessary, i.e. “essentially give the people the power to define what else our government should do.” It ONLY allows Congress to pass any law necessary for carrying out the listed powers in the previous Sections of the Article, which are the power to establish and maintain an army and navy, to establish post offices, to create courts, to regulate commerce between the states, to declare war, and to raise money. We cannot “view society as organized ‘as if’ a [social] contract had been formed between the citizen and the sovereign power, [which] will ground the nature of the obligations of each to the other…called [a] social contract.” The People of the United States are NOT bound by a social contract, which is nothing more than a speculative formulation serving as a guide in the investigation or solution of a problem absent a social order. The United States was founded upon and its people are bound by the US Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence; not some philosophical theory based on natural law, which cannot be supported. Our system of jurisprudence (known as Common Law) was designed to secure the rights of individuals to property and to make it difficult for the government or a bureaucratic governmental structure to take it from us. Amendment 5 reads “No person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” For example, it is not the responsibility of the state, through the Public Trust Doctrine, to hold privately-owned lands and waters in trust for the public. Common Law, which is most represented in our Freedom Documents, deals in real property; not written abstractions of performance agreements or contracts, such as a social contract, which assumes the existence of natural laws; not to mention natural law conflicts with social justice that progressives so flagrantly support. “To give a man his life but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave.” Common Law was designed to limit, even eliminate allowing courts to use their discretion and apply justice in accordance with natural law, which refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. This is totalitarianism, and precisely that which we revolted against during the American Revolution. Our government was instituted to secure these rights, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed; not become destructive to these ends in such a form that it effects our safety and happiness as it has. The Declaration of Independence reads, “It is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under ABSOLUTE DESPOTISM, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. –Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government.” Although natural law is often conflated with Common Law, the two are distinct in that natural law is a view that certain rights or values are inherent in or universally cognizable by virtue of human reason or human nature, while common law is the legal tradition whereby certain rights or values are legally cognizable by virtue of judicial recognition or articulation. Common Law recognizes that the power of government lies in the common people and not in an elite group of power brokers who steal this power from the people as they have been doing to centralize it into the hands of a few power-oriented men. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;” these rights are CLAIMS, not requests. Neither do our rights assume the existence of natural laws that in turn define the natural rights of individuals, where individuals can trade off some of these rights under a “social contract” for the protection that government can provide.