Moi

Stuart K. Hayashi







This is a picture of me.

This post serves no purpose other than to get my photograph to appear on the margin of this weblog. I hope this works; I'm not good at this sort of thing I'm also hoping that the photo won't send you to any outside link.



UPDATE several minutes later... I see it didn't work. I don't know if this is because I established this as a team weblog to begin with. But what I was attempting did work in Stu-Topia.

A Book Reviewer Who Doesn't Know the Definition of 'Book Review'

Stuart K. Hayashi

Jenny Turner was supposed to review the book Ayn Rand by Jeffrey Britting for the London Review of Books (referral from Rockwell; 11/3/05).

What Ms. Turner wrote can hardly be called a book review. You can see right on the top what the assigned subject was:

Ayn Rand by Jeff Britting [ Buy from the London Review Bookshop ] · Duckworth, 155 pp, £12.99

Yet, in this humungous mess belched out by Ms. Turner, we find that, out of all 49 of its paragraphs, Britting's book is only mentioned in three of them . . . in passing.

And in those three paragraphs, there are barely any references at all to Britting's writing style, to the manner in which he organized ideas, or in his presentation. Ms. Turner cares not to inform us whether this book is easy or difficult to read, whether it is worthy of interest by the general public or not, or whether it had any good or bad points.

You would expect the London Review of Books to notice that a book review's purpose is to assess the quality of work done by the author of the book being reviewed: in this case, the job Jeff Britting did with his book -- the one this publication claims to be reviewing, remember?

Turner's essay is a sham from the get-go, because it cannot be considered a book review by any reasonable standard. Instead, it's a review of Ayn Rand's reputation. Rather than address the quality of Jeff Britting's book, this "reviewer" launches a screed against the tome's subject.

Excuse, me, Ms. Turner, but if I wrote a book about Napoleon, you're supposed to talk about how well I wrote the book; not about how much you like or hate Napoleon.

Somebody needs to inform Jenny Turner and the London Review of Books that the publication's name isn't London Review of People. How difficult is it to understand that a book review is actually supposed to review a book?

He Denounced Japanese Internment When It Mattered

Stuart K. Hayashi


Steven Greenhut is the author of a terrific book about the horrors of eminent domain, titled Abuse of Power.

And, on Sunday, November 20, he produced a fascinating op-ed piece (referral from: L. Rockwell) about Orange County Register publisher R. C. Hoiles, who spoke out against the U.S. government's interment of Japanese-Americans when it mattered most: when this injustice was actually occurring.

As Greenhut observes, it's very easy for people today to condemn some horrible government action decades after the fact. It takes a real man, such as Hoiles, to speak out against it when it's happening. He was among a minority of people who spoke out for the rights of a minority whom bigots stereotyped as enemies of the American way on account of their being "unassimable" and coming from a "savage culture."

Speaking of people who stereotype minorities I am getting increasingly disappointed with Thomas Sowell. Greenhut's piece on the Japanese-American internment reminds me of this.

I found it quite self-contradictory that, in the very same column, Sowell endorsed the conclusions of two political books -- Greenhut's criticism of eminent domain and Michelle Malkin's apologia for Japanese-American internment.

Sowell correctly faults the governemnt for forcibly taking houses away from people, and yet he apparently doesn't fault the government for forcibly taking people away from their houses.

The real defenders of freedom are not jingoists, but people lik Hoiles who are rabidly in favor of laissez-faire enterprise and civil liberties and privacy rights equally.

Not surprisingly, Hoiles counted himself as an admirer of Ayn Rand's.

His is an example worth following.

Right On, Tibor!

Stuart K. Hayashi

Last Saturday, C-SPAN aired a panel discussion held at the second annual Liberty Film Festival. I taped it because its participants included communist-turned-neoconservative Ronald Radosh (ho-hum), NewsMax writer James Hirsen (ho-hum), and the Ayn Rand Institute's Jeff Britting, who was a co-producer of Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life (excellent!).

I was rather disappointed in the event, as Jeff Britting only got to have his say about three times. The moderator from the American Enterprise Institute pretty much let the leftwing movie critic Richard Schickel interrupt everyone else whenever he wanted.

Fortunately, business ethicist Tibor R. Machan of the International Society for Individual Liberty noticed what was wrong with this "discussion": "I think Jeff Britt[ing], with his Randian ideas, was treated shabbily and hypocritically." How shabbily?

Upon airing these views as Rand’s, Britting was told his ideas are ridiculous—by Schickle and some others. Even Ron Radosh, who is an ex-Communist but has long since recanted, made a special point of dismissing and deriding Rand’s viewpoint on this issue.

What did these people object to?

The gist of it went that if one seriously disapproves of someone's views, one has every right (and often ought) to boycott them. Otherwise one is aiding and abetting someone who is working against one’s ideals. Accordingly, if one is pro-capitalist and they are procommunist, one has the right and maybe even the responsibility to boycott and, if possible, blacklist them.

This really is a simple idea: Jews who didn't wish to purchase German cars even way after WWII were engaging in such a justified boycott -- refusing to give jobs to and enrich Germans who were very likely complicit in the horrors of Nazism. If one refuses to hire someone to clean one’s home or type one’s manuscripts or whatever, someone who is an avowed or secret but well enough known communist, one is doing the right thing. If one, a pro-choice advocate, refuses to do business with pro-life advocates, this makes perfectly good moral sense.

Generally, Rand held that one has every right to make a determination who one will freely do business with. She was not advocating any government action against the Hollywood folks. She did, however, think they were morally depraved for giving aid and comfort to Soviets and their American spies. So Hollywood had every right, even responsibility, to boycott or blacklist them.

Free speech means that you can say whatever you want to anyone willing to listen, without violating anyone else's right to life or property and without any other party -- government or otherwise -- threatening violence upon you on account of your speech. The threat of violence is embodied in every injunction, every citation, and every regulation of government since, the more one resists the law, the more severe the penalty will be enforced by armed government officials.

Free speech means that I can either make a movie out of my own screenplay or sell my screenplay to any studio wishing to purchase it. If I want someone other than myself to make a film out of my treatment, then I can only rightfully make this happen if I have the other party's permission. We have a natural, Lockean right to do this without anyone -- government-employed or otherwise -- threatening violence on us in order to coerce us to stop.

Free speech does not mean that, if no one will buy my screenplay willingly, I have the right to have the government or some gang of thugs coerce some film studio to purchase it under the threat of violence for noncompliance. That isn't upholding my right to free speech; it is violating the right of the studio to its own property -- and thus violating the free speech rights of the studio's owners. The right to free speech entails the right of any private citizen to refuse participation in any form of expression outside a court of law.


Interestingly, the movie Schickel called "the best of 2004" actually glamorized a real-life wealthy Hollywood producer who was a very outspoken participant in the blacklist. I suppose he likes seeing Hollywood producers consistently practicing capitalism in biopics but not in concrete reality.


The second-best panelist was James Hirsen, since he pointed out that Joseph McCarthy was right that Soviet agents really had infiltrated the U.S. federal government. But he didn't voice any support for Britting's view, I'm sad to say.

I should have known that only Dr. Machan would give this event the criticism it deserves.

UPDATE from Wednesday, November 9, 2005: I also like this November 8 column of Dr. Machan's about the hypocrisy of media corporations distributing motion pictures that denounce corporations per se.

Middle-Eastern Civilians More Murderous than American Ones?

Stuart K. Hayashi


I have often been told that Middle-Eastern Muslims should not be allowed to immigrate into the United States, because they are "culturally stuck in the Stone Age and murder is inherent to their culture."

When I ask people making such accusations to actually bother backing themselves up with statistics, they tell me that I'm just plain "ignorant of Muslim culture. If you weren't ignorant, you would understand that the Middle-Eastern culture enshrines murder and that Middle-Eastern immigrants carry that cultural baggage with them when they settle in the U.S. and Europe."

But if one is going to accuse an entire demographic of people of being murderous, one should actually look at the hard data collected on the number of murders. And it won't help to simply create a long list of all the murders ever committed by Muslims, because that doesn't put anything into perspective. That has no context. If one wants to prove that an immigrant from a Muslim-dominated country is likelier to commit murder than someone born in a Western country like America, then one should compare the murder rates of Muslim-dominated countries to Western ones.

When it comes to murder committed by the State itself, it is difficult to compete with an Islamic fundamentalist state like that of Iran or Saudi Arabia. For information on mass murder committed by national governments, one can check out information provided by Rudolph J. Rummel.

However, the story is different when it comes to the civilian populations of various countries, according to a chart provided by the United Nations Survey on Crime, which takes into account murders in general, as opposed to just "honor" killings.

The people who keep telling me about how Middle-Eastern immigrants are so likely to commit "honor" killings didn't provide me with statistics on this when I asked them for it last week, so I had to find this information myself. According to Human Rights Watch, one third of all the homicides in Jordan -- the Islamic country that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is from -- are "honor" killings.

Additionally, there were 400 "honor" killings in Yemen in 1997, and, out of the 812 homicides performed in Egypt in 1995, 52 were "honor" killings.

Expect some people to cite those statistics as proof that all Muslims are evil, without bothering to measures these figures against murders committed by non-Muslims or the number of Muslims who have not been charged with murder or domestic violence.

Inthe United States, where Muslims comprise only 1 percent of the population, there are 4 civilian-committed murders for every 100,000 people per year. That's a higher annual murder rate than in places like India, whose 144 Muslims comprise 13.4 percent of the population, the Muslim-dominated constitutional monarchy of Yemen, and Azerbaijan, which is 93.4 percent Moslem. The murder rates for India, Yemen, and Azerbaijan are all 3 civilian-committted murders per 100,000 people.

And Qatar,a Middle-Eastern nation that is 95 percent Muslim, the notorious Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia, which is 88 percent and which has seen attacks from particularly vicious Islamic terrorists, have the respective annual rates of civilian-committed murder: 1 per million per year (since the country has fewer than 1 million residents, this suggests that , occasionally a year may go by without any civilian-committed murders) 4 per million, and 1 per 100,000.

If these figures are corect, then that means that Qatar and Saudi Arabia have fewer civilian-committed murders than many of the more civilized countries that Middle-Easterners often migrate to: Norway (1 per 100,000), Denmark (1 per 100,000), Holland (the place where an Islamic fanatic murdered Theo Van Gogh, 1 per 100,000), the United Kingdom (1 per 100,000), and Canada (1 per 100,000).

It also means that Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia have fewer civilian-committed murders per population than even more countries that Middle-Eastern immigrants flock to: Australia (2 per 100,000), France (2 per 100,000 [my rightwing critics would have you believe that the riots in France prove the evil of Middle-Eastern immigrants, of course, but we have yet to see how this will affect the overall trend in France]), and Finland (3 per 100,000). And all these countries have fewer murders per person per year than the USA.

And let's return to the subject of Jordan, where one third of all homicides are "honor" killings. That comes down to an estimated average of 33.4 "honor" killings out of 100 civilian-committed murders per year in a country with a population of 5.759 million people. That's an annual murder rate of approximately 2 people per 100,000 per year.

And we can also revisit Egypt, in which there were a total 812 recorded civilian-created murders in 1995. If that were the number of people civilians murdered per year, in a population of 77.5 million, then that also comes to an annual murder rate of 2 per 100,000.

That would mean that even Jordan and Egypt have fewer civilian-committed murders than Finland, India, Romania, and the United States.

None of this is to say that you are less likely to be violently killed in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Jordan than in the United States. The opposite is true! It's just that the party doing the vast majority of killing in illiberal, Islamic fundamentalist countries is the authoritarian government.

It it the autocratic states of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, Sudan, and Iran that prop up the terrorists who have waged war against the West. Middle-Eastern immigrants flee to America, Finland, Holland, and Australia to escape from being executed by the State over something harmless like being homosexual, charging usury, or saying something blasphemous.

The point is not that Muslim countries are safer than America. They clearly aren't. The point is that, when somebody asserts -- without citing any statistics, mind you -- that allowing Middle-Easterners from Mohammedan countries to immigrate into Western countries will necessarily increase the Western coutries' murder rates, he doesn't make a rational case.

When my critics say that a Middle-Eastern Muslim immigrant is likelier to murder me than a native-born American, because that immigrant will "refuse to assimilate into American culture, and will isntead behave in America the same way he did in his home country," that rightwing critic refutes himself.

If an immigrant from Islamic Yemen is just as likely to murders someone when he's in America as he would be in Yemen, then there is a 33-percent greater chance of an American murdering that Yemenese alien than for that Yemenese alien to murder an American.

If my critics choose to dismiss the U.N. statistics I have cited, then I challenge them to come up with better, more reliable statistics. My critics can call me "ignorant of Middle-Eastern culture" all they want. The truth remains that, as long as my critics go along prattling about how letting Middle-Eastern peoples freely immigrate into the United States will necessarily increase the likelihood of my being murdered, their case will be based upon nothing but presumptions if they do not present any statistical data to support their inflammatory claims.

A Note About Changes at 'The Fiftieth Star'

Stuart K. Hayashi

As he has noted in the previous post, Fiftieth Star writer Grant Jones has started a new blog titled The Dougout.

For the record, he will remain on The Fiftieth Star's team and will still post here occasionally. However, The Dougout will now be his primary blog. More of his writing will appear there than over here. For Mr. Jones's many fans, The Dougout is the site to bookmark.

As of this moment, I am unsure about the future of The Fifieth Star. Before Mr. Jones's arrival on this blog, I had gone for an entire year without posting anything on it. I cannot promise that I will post on this blog very often in the near (or even distant) future.

I apologize for any disappointment this may cause our readers.

Rest assured, however, that this will probably not be the final post on The Fiftieth Star, which is currently undergoing a transitory phase.



UPDATE from Friday, November 4, 2005: Grant Jones will not be making any occasional posts on this blog in the future. Those who wish to read his work are directed solely to his new blog, The Dougout.

I Hate Moving

Grant Jones

But, sometimes it is necessary. I've started a new weblog called The Dougout.

Thanks to all the visitors of The 50th Star.

My Favorite Cephalopods

Stuart K. Hayashi

I am very excited about the news that the first-ever photographs of a live giant squid have recently been released to the public. These photos, such as the one below, were taken in September 2004. For more information, see here.




I have always loved giant monsters, so this has really made my week.

Speaking of which, the photo reminds me of the pic below, which is from the movie Space Monster Dogora.

The Myth of the "Social Contract," Pt. 1

"Social Contract" Theory as Flawed from the Beginning

Stuart K. Hayashi


This is intended to be part of a series explaining the fallacy behind the notion that a "Social Contract" provides justification for collectivist laws.


Whenever I explain to "liberals" and conservatives that the very institution of taxation is immoral, they ejaculate the knee-jerk reply that "we all live in 'Society,' and by living in Society, you agree to the terms of the Social Contract."

According to Social Contract theory, human beings must sacrifice some freedom for "the greater good." Social Contract theorists from the early Enlightenment postulated that the first human beings existed in a "state of nature" that was nothing more than an anarchic chaos in which you could murder anyone or be murdered at any time. This is complete freedom, the Social Contract philosophers disingenuously estimate, but there is no security.

Thomas Hobbes, an early Social Contract theorist (and also the namesake of a highly-overrated comic-strip character), described life under this condition as "solitary," as well as "nasty, brutish, and short."

Thus, say the Social Contract theorists, human beings formed governments to protect the tribe as a whole. The existence of any laws limits everyone's freedom but it also provides more security. In the "state of nature," I once had the freedom to go around beating people up. Now, I no longer have that liberty. But, in return, I myself am safe from having someone else assault my person.

This, insist the theorists, is the basis of democracy. Everyone is safer, and the government has an ethical basis for existing because it has, in the words of the Declaration of Independnece, "the consent of the governed."

The exchange between the Government ("Society") and me is the Social Contract. The Government agrees to protect me. Likewise, I assent to follow the laws of that government, no matter how much I may disapprove of some of them.

Consequently, when I point out that taxation is a form of extortion, wherein the government points a gun at you and threatens, "Your money or your life!", welfare-statist (il)liberals and jingoistic conservatives scold me for my so-called ignorance.

They get even angrier when I note that the draft and Jury "Duty" subpoenas are involuntary servitude. They screech that because I live in "Society" under the protection of the U.S. government, I have contractually obligated myself to pay taxes and to serve in the military or jury if the government so forces me. They say that this is not involuntary at all, as it is part of my voluntary Contractual agreement with "Society."

This is hogwash on so many levels.

Let's begin at the flaws that Social Contract theorists make from the outset.


The Holes in the "State of Nature" Verbiage

The sort of "anarchy" that supposedly arose from the "state of nature" never truly existed. The institution of de-facto government is at least as old as mankind itself (perhaps even older).

The apes that exist today, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, already have a visible "social order" that became the precursor for government. A "society" of gorillas -- called a band -- is collectivist but elitist rather than egalitarian. The strongest male of the band is the de-facto Head of State, for he is the leader. He has as much sex as he wants with the females, and the other males yield to him in fear; any male that defies his authority will receive a beating and possibly become exiled from the "society." (Terms for groups of monkeys include troop and tribe and even . . . cartload?)

Such ape patterns are older than our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens (yes, the "sapiens" is technically listed twice). Consequently, the patterns that would eventually "evolve" into government predate our kind (known as Cro-Magnon Man).

Hobbes was right about primitive human beings having lives that were "nasty, brutish, and short," but the institution of government did nothing to solve that until the advent of industrialization at the twilight of the eighteenth century.

From One Million Years B.C. to 1800 A.D., the average human lifespan remained at a steady 27 years. This was for every one of the six inhabited continents, even though government existed during that entire duration -- and codified government had already emerged by 5000 B.C. Yet from 1800 A.D. to 1900 A.D., the average lifespan for Europeans and North Americans shot up to 47 years -- as a conequence of the Industrial Revolution. Further advances in industrialization increased the standard of living so that the average European and U.S. lifespan shot up to 77 years by 1988 A.D.

Government alone did not stop U.S. lives from being "nasty," "brutish," or "short"; what changed the situation was that a national government more relatively laissez-faire than most allowed enough freedom to give human incentives to create the wealth that lengthened lifespans.

And Hobbes was outright wrong about life for primitive men being "solitary" -- members of our species's scientifically-classified order, Primates, which includes apes, associated with one another in groups even before our own species evolved.

In short, "Government" and "Society" -- at least in very primitive forms -- anteceded the modern human species. "Society" and "Government" are not true innovations. What separates us human beings from our ape ancestors is that we are able to codify and conceptualize these social formations through our rational faculty, which gives us the ability to think and create words to symbolize ideas for the purpose of communcating with ourselves and others.


The False Dichotomy Between Liberty and Security

The Social Contract theorists also flub when they draw a fallacious distinction between individual freedom and societal security. Actually, the objectively best form of government protects the life, liberty, and private property of every human being from the initiation -- in other words, the starting -- of physical force (violence or the threat thereof) against the person or private property of innocent people who have initiated no such force upon anyone else and do not consent to such force.

The government should otherwise let everyone do anything they want with their own private property (which includes their own bodies) with consenting adults.

The fact is that freedom and security are not inversely related. Freedom is a special kind of security -- security from somebody using violence against your or your private property without your consent when you have not started any such violence on any other nonconsenting person's life or property.

In other words, to live under a form of anarchy in which you could murder anyone or be murdered at any time, without anyone's life or property being protected, is not total freedom. It is the opposite. It is de-facto totalitarianism. You are no freer from tyranny -- and, by "tyranny," I mean the constant threat of arbitrary violence -- under this sort of anarchy than you are under Stalinism.

For the government to create a system wherein it exercises violence against only those whom its executive branch have rationally ascertained to have definively initiated force against innocent, nonconsenting parties, is not a system where some "freedom" is limited for the sake of security. It maximizes both freedom and security on the individual level. The societal group being better off is merely a consequence -- and indeed, can only be a consequence -- of the individual's rights remaining sovereign.

Thus, any morally just government is based upon individual rights, and not the security of the group (the group's security can only be the result of the guarding of what is much more morally relevant -- the liberty of the individual from coercive violence).

In other words, a laissez-faire system of government does not limit any freedom to give you security. Rather, it gives you absolute freedom by securing you from that which threatens violence upon your person or private property.


Does Democracy Entail the Consent of the Governed -- Everyone Governed?

Social Contract theorists state that the sort of government most consistent with the Social Contract is democracy, because "the people" elect a ruler. Ergo, the elected sovereign rules only with "the consent of the governed." The same cannot be said of a king, since he was not directly elected by "the people" and so "the people" did not really give their consent.

Such rationalizations amount to utter tripe. The conclusion that a democratically elected leader has "the consent of the governed" makes the foolish assumption that consent is given on the collective level instead of the individual.

If 51 percent of "the people" vote for the Head of State, then we are led to believe that he has "the consent of the governed," because the majority ostensively represents the whole.

Yet it does not. The elected leader does not truly have "the consent of the governed" if he has 51 percent of the vote -- he only has the (tacit) consent of 51 percent of voters. As for the other 49 percent, he and the majority merely impose themselves upon this minority -- a minority that has not offered its consent.

The democratic Head of State does not even truly have the "governed"'s consent if he receives 99.99 percent of the vote -- .01 percent does not really consent. The elected leader would only truly have the "consent of the governed" if he had the unanimous support of all who lived under his rule.

Sir Robert Filmer of the 1600s is remembered today almost entirely because John Locke wrote his Two Treatises on Government to rebut his Patriarcha (1680).

However, despite its countless flaws, Filmer's Patriarcha is correct to note that democracy cannot truly have the "consent of the governed" without unanimous -- rather than majority approval. In Chapter 2, Section 6, Filmer opines,

It may be answered by some that if either the greatest part of a kingdom [that is, the majority of voters], or if a smaller part only by themselves [a minority of voters], and all the rest by proxy, or if the part not concurring in election [that is, non-voters] do after, by a tacit assent, ratify the act of others [that is, go along with the voters who got their candidate elected], that in all these cases it may be said to be the work of the whole multitude [that is, we truly have "consent of the governed" because the ruler has unanimous consent among everyone he governs].

As to the acts of the major part of a multitude [the majority], it is true that by politic human constitutions it is oft[en] ordained that the voices of the most [the majority] shall overrule the rest; and such ordinances bind, because where men are assembled by a human power, that power that doth assemble them can also limit and direct the manner of the execution of that power, and by such derivative power, made known by law or custom, either the greater part, or two thirds, or three parts of five, or the like, have power to oversway the liberty of their opposites [that is, the minority voters]. But in assemblies that take their authority from the law of nature, it cannot be so; for what freedom or liberty is due to any man by the law of nature no inferior power can alter, limit or diminish; no one man nor a multitude can give away the natural right of another [wise sentence!!! --S.H.]. The law of nature is unchangeable, and howsoever one man may hinder another in the use or exercise of his natural right, yet thereby no man loseth the right of itself; for the right and the use of the right may be distinguished, as right and possession are oft[en] distinct. Therefore, unless it can be proved by the law of nature that the major or some other part [the majorit voters] have power to overrule the rest of the multitude [the minority voters], it must follow that the acts of multitudes not entire [that is, the majority voters and the rest of the population] are not binding to all but only to such as consent unto them.

In other words, how can you say an elected official has "the consent of the governed" when he governs over a minority that withheld consent to his rule by voting against him?

It is, consequently, quite hypocritical of Social Contract theorists to invoke "the consent of the governed" to tout democratic elections as a fully valid means of selecting who will reign over a people.


When Did I Consent to the "Social Contract"'s Terms?

If my living in society somehow legally and ethically binds me to the Social Contract's terms (which the Social Contractarians so conveniently avoid specifying), then exactly when did my consent to the Social Contract become legally binding?

Recall that any contract you may potentially agree to objectively becomes legally binding at the point where both parties making the agreement have expressed their committment to it.

People typically live and work in societies into which they are born. It is not sane, however, to say that one signs any Social Contract by having been born, as that is not voluntary; you could not even offer consent (not even a kid's equivalent of "consent").

When you partake in any contract -- even an implicit, common-law contract (more on those later), it is because of behavior you voluntarily engaged in.

Meanwhile, you have no real choice in what society you lived in as a child. So your simply being born into and growing up in a community is not a valid offering of consent. Just because I grew up in a cetain region, my doing so did not contractually obligate me to follow morally abhorrent laws that threatened to use force against me for disobedience.

Therefore, my living in this society as a child was not a tacit "signing" of any Social Contract on my part. (Besides, I wasn't legally competent anyway.)

But what about adulthood? If you in live in a country as an adult, when you are legally permitted to leave it, then does that constitute a signing of the Social Contract?

There is a problem there. Any valid contract -- including an oral one -- has definable terms which are to be amended only with the consent of all parties who agreed to the previous terms in the first place.

Then again, how does any philosopher know what the terms of the Social Contract are, to begin with? Now that's worth some discussion...

Continued in Part 2, Part 3, Part 4...