> we implicitly sign the social contract by accepting it's benefits. We benefit from not living amidst anarchic chaos, and we benefit from the services provided

> we implicitly sign the social contract by accepting it's benefits. We benefit from not living amidst anarchic chaos, and we benefit from the services provided by the state (roads, schools, etc.) However, if, say, I said, "I don't like the schools and I homeschool my kids, I think the military is 5x larger than it should be, I'm willing to pay for roads, I think drugs and prostitution should not be crimes and the police should be cut by 30%... and therefore my tax bill should be only x% of what it is", I don't actually have a choice in what "benefits" I "accept". (Suppose, for sake of argument, that I'd voted in every way I could for candidates who would change policies towards what I wanted, and it didn't work.) One response to that is "go live somewhere else", but (a) there may not be a somewhere else with a government that doesn't force people to pay for things I found objectionable, and (b) if I own my house and the land it's on, why should I have to move? There are people who will demand that you pay for certain services, and back this demand up with the threat of force, which will ultimately be enforced if needed. There's a little bit you can do to try to influence how it turns out, but for the average citizen, it's next to nothing. Some people are perfectly happy with every aspect of this. Others are less happy, but see no point in complaining. A few do complain, and the results they get probably inform the previous group's perception. > b[e]ing alive entails responsibilities outside yourself I don't like the use of the word "responsibility" here. The term "responsibility" implies, to me at least, that you're doing something wrong if you don't live up to your responsibility. If you agreed voluntarily to a contract or an informal promise, failing to fulfill it does seem wrong. Disliking the terms of an alleged "social contract" that other people unilaterally impose upon you and choosing to disobey them is risky, but it is not wrong. I guess there's one way in which it can be considered a contract. The true terms of the contract are, "Obey whatever rules we come up with (which change with every ballot measure and every legislature meeting) and we won't inflict our arbitrarily bad punishments upon you." But this would probably be considered under duress. Edit: Seems Lysander Spooner said the same stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract#Voluntarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract#Voluntarism And it says: "[in the 1600s] more importance was attached to consideration, meaning a mutual exchange of benefits necessary to the formation of a valid contract, and most contracts had implicit terms that arose from the nature of the contractual relationship rather than from the choices made by the parties. Accordingly, it has been argued that social contract theory is more consistent with the contract law of the time of Hobbes and Locke than with the contract law of our time, and that certain features in the social contract which seem anomalous to us, such as the belief that we are bound by a contract formulated by our distant ancestors, would not have seemed as strange to Hobbes' contemporaries as they do to us."