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Common Sense in 324 Words


First people want to live peacefully because this minimises risk and uncertainty as much as possible. A society based on agreements is the result. People will agree that whoever gets real property (land and buildings) with the agreement of the prior owner is now the owner.

The alternatives are absurdities. The only protest at this is original appropriation, but since the appropriator is agreeing with nobody about the land (nobody owns it before the appropriator appropriates it) there is nobody to steal it from. Using 'society' as a plaintiff is reification, so no dice.

The access right of way over somebody else's land is a common-sense presumption uness they put a fence in the way, at which point the common-sense presumption is to leave well alone. Likely this will be the courts' approach as a person cannot know innately what land belongs to whom, what they're doing with that land, or what their position is on using paths on that land.

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Contracts are the easiest-to-understand and most convenient form for these agreements to assume. Humans are biologically, epistemologically and ontologically distinctive individuals with minds and free will, or an awfully good simulacrum of free will. Therefore each individual has a personality and past-history distinct from those of any other individual.

This makes debts and property matters of personal accountability, so a debt or a property cannot automatically fall on a certain surviving person unless agreed to by the deceased person and the survivor. Therefore death wipes out a person's debts and property titles unless agreements have been made stating otherwise.

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A 'social contract' is basically an unagreed agreement, and so useless. The state is an unconsented-to parasite born from conquest or religion or some combination depending on which state one looks at. Only those who act to consent to the taxation, regulation and inflation of the state should be made to comply.

Political authority is a mirage that cannot be justified.

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