Here's an article I read that seems to follow along some lines of thought I'd previously had and ties a lot of other things together:
Are we ruled by our tacit consent or submission? In order words, is government a construction that most people participate voluntarily and have accepted the consequences or something they simply comply with to avoid being harmed?
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff26.html
Here's an excerpt of one section that I'd already had a lot of thoughts about but apparently someone else has tied a lot of them together:
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" 1.
The war waged by the North showed definitively that the U.S. government does not rest on the consent of the governed, as theory might have it, but on compulsion and force.
2.
The Constitution at its inception was consented to by only a small number of people living in the country.
3.
The consent of that small number could not extend to future persons.
4.
When persons voted subsequently, that cannot be construed as consent. Voters, being forced to pay taxes and being ruled in other ways, being "under peril of weighty punishments" if they rebel, will vote in order to try to relieve their condition. This in no way indicates that they consent to it.
5.
In the century after the U.S.A. began, only a small fraction of the people were allowed to vote and still fewer actually voted, thereby limiting greatly any consent to the Constitution, the government, or the laws promulgated by that government and limiting the legitimacy of all of these with respect to the nonvoters.
6.
The payment of taxes can’t be construed as consent because taxes are compulsory.
7.
There is nothing for a voter to consent to anyway, since the Constitution is not and never was a valid agreement or contract.
8.
The voters cannot possibly be providing consent when the Constitution’s powers are so vast that the lives, properties, and liberties of the people are delivered up to the State by this document.
9.
Government power can’t be legitimated or justified by consent of the strongest party or by consent of the majority.
10.
Voting amounts to a situation in which a fraction of the population appoints agents who will administer the government under the Constitution’s name. This however cannot legally bind those others who do not so vote. And even that authority is undermined by the fact that the principals (the voters) are unknown and unnamed, their ballots are cast in secret, and they can have no responsibility for the acts of their agents. The agents (elected officials) do not know who their principals are either.
"
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