>these rights can also be made unalienable by a firm societal devotion to humanism
This seems fair enough, I can understand this, but only from the point of view that if you want rights at all then you need to start somewhere, and there is no position I can see that does not involve some kind of hand wavy "that's just the way that it is", not that I am faulting you on that, but it's how I see the idea, anyway.
>the liberating power of free markets.
Heh, I needed a good laugh today :)
"We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We call those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger." -- Peter Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread.
>The social contract does not only bind our government in its treatment of us; it binds us in how we treat each other, because our culture is not narrowly limited to our political beliefs but rather defines how we treat each other.
I'd rather have the social contract detached from government; if it must be attached then I view it as illegitimate, as illegitimate as I view the state which does not seek consent of the governed. It is material conditions that give rise to new concepts of rights, morality, justice and freedom. As Marx said, the Communist views the current bourgeois institutions of rights and morality as a facade, and behind those lurk even more bourgeois prejudices.
>To reject the social contract is to be an anarchist.
I would say, it is to be a certain kind of anarchist. The contracts we have today carry the threat of force to legitimise them; however there are contracts between friends which do not. This kind of contract is in my opinion possible at a larger scale in a stateless anarchist (non-proprietarian) society.
>Yes, it is rather laissez-faire, but it still firmly binds us to treat each other with mutual respect for our lives, our freedom, and the fruits of our labor.
Kropotkin wrote that this is exactly not the case, lamenting how the worker must surrender one third to the capitalist and middleman and one third to the state in the form of tax. The material conditions that influence the creation of these social contracts will also influence the creation of our interactions between each other.
I am no defender of the Soviet Union, but to me it is entirely possible for the USSR's conception of rights and freedoms to be just as valid as those of the US. The wall was a short sighted and silly idea in my opinion. And yet I feel as though behind Raegan lurked his own prejudices as to what rights should prevail, even if his intentions may be noble and in desire of freedom (which I don't believe so much).
It is interesting to me to see the difference between what is moral, what should be legislated, and indeed whether there is any morality and legislation at all (i.e Stirnerist egoism),