An oral contract, so the cynics say, is worth only the paper it's written on; and although that's not by any means always the case it's hard to gainsay. The exceptions were such as the saying in the Old Country that "An Englishman's word is his bond" - and even today, huge numbers of financial transactions are agreed upon every day on the strength of a promise on the telephone, little more. So the cynics do overstate their case a bit.
A written contract, though, is always more secure; and to be binding it must be signed by both parties. You owe payments under a mortgage? - only because, when you bought the house, you placed your signature on the note. A signing makes it firm, it locks the matter up, it removes the doubt and the argument. It's very hard to dispute; to get out of a signed contract, one would have to show the signature to be a forgery or its terms to be fraudulent.
What, then, can we say of a contract that nobody signed? - that it's worth very little at best. Perhaps it was a draft, a set of proposals for the contracting parties to discuss, but without commitment. Or perhaps it was a forgery, that none of them even saw.
And what in any case has all this got to do the price of tomatoes? - let me warm to my theme, by inviting attention to the Declaration of Independence, a copy of which hangs framed upon my office wall.
Beneath its magnificent text you and I can read the signatures of those who agreed to what it said; John Hancock's appears bold and flowery right in the middle, the others all around his. Every one of those brave men was signing what could easily have become his own death warrant. Had the Brits not lost the war, they would all have been hung as traitors.
Now, that's a contract. Okay, to be purist, it's more of a compact than a contract, but you know what I mean. These people meant what they were signing, it was very solemn and binding. They really were telling the lawful government of the day that it could go chase; that they'd obey it no longer.
And so Americans became independent of their former masters. What then; what, specifically, of the Constitution they may have agreed upon a few years later?
No John Hancock
Take a look! Nobody signed it! Not one!
Historical records doubtless prove that down there in Philly, representatives of the States did, for sure, hold meetings and reach agreement on a voice vote. But they never put their names to the document. Funny thing!
They also show that subsequently, the State governments there represented did ratify it, and so it became what it's supposed to be today - the Supreme Law. But nobody actually signed it, not even the government people - who were, for sure, a great deal more honorable than their successors are today.
Worse: the Constitution is a form of agreement between two parties, the States and the new Federal government it set up. So there ought to be signatures from both of them, not just one party. Yet there are neither!
Worse yet: the authors said they were acting on behalf of "We the People"; they wrote those as the very first three words. So where are the signatures of Us the People, or at least of some of Us? - same place as the signatures of everyone else, to this purported contract; nowhere.
Worse even yet: even if (on an admittedly rather long piece of parchment) all of They the People had actually signed it, how can you and I be bound by its terms, seeing that none of us were there in Philly, nor even yet a gleam in our great-great-great-great grandparents' eyes?
By now I hope it's rather obvious that whatever its merits (and it has many) the Constitution has no binding effect on anyone living today and probably not on anyone living in 1781 or 1793, because nobody ever signed it. And that's really rather disconbobulating, for I make quite frequent reference to it right here in this column, as something government should start to obey.
It does do this for us, though: it helps us think a deal more clearly than our government school civics teacher ever intended us to think. And when we've thunk, we do come up with this stake in the ground: right now, never having signed any contract with government, you and I have no proper obligation to give it anything whatsoever. All the purported obligations the Feds place upon us derive from its authority under the Constitution, and we never signed that (any more than government people did!) so we owe nothing to the Feds. And all those we are supposed to owe State and Town are, likewise, null and void for we never signed any contract there either.
So, here and now and despite severe indications to the contrary, you and I are free and sovereign individuals fully entitled to live accordingly. Admittedly we may not get very far in doing so, but the good news is that the tyrants who deny it have no right or justice on their side whatever; we can hold our heads high in the knowledge that they have no moral suasion at all, just raw power. We never, ever signed any agreement to do anything they tell us!
So have we arrived at the conclusion that is the most valuable thing that can be learned from this column: that every human being is the sole owner of his or her own life, and that if we do what any agent of any government tells us to, it is because he can wield more force than we can, and for no other reason. That despite the fine protestations of its spokesmen to the contrary (that they make up a government "of, by and for the People", for example) all that is hogwash and the true truth is that they rule us only by might, not by right.
And then? Well, there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
| © Copyright Jim Davies 1999 |
Jim Davies lives in New Hampshire,
and enjoys contemplating which way is up.
The above is Edition # 200
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