In response to increasing levels of expatriation over the past few years, the United States government has hiked the fee to denounce citizenship by a whopping 422%. From now on, if you would like to renounce your United States citizenship, you must pay $2,350 to the State Department. The government is effectively holding its citizens hostage.

The State Department defended the hike by saying it’s necessary due to demand for their services and increased workload. While I’m sure State Department officials are working hard to process all the expatriations, this brings up the question of what good all this work does in the first place. Who exactly do citizenship renunciation fees help besides the leviathan?

While lots of political discourse centers around the idea that people agree to abide by government rules and regulations by continuing to live in its jurisdiction, this “social contract” theory is total bunk. The fact that I live in the United States doesn’t constitute consent to whatever the government does any more than if I went to your house and forced you to pay me tribute for as long as you continued living there.

The social contract bullies who shout “love it or leave it!” like to use this implied consent as an excuse to boss people around and impose their preferences on everyone else regardless of the people’s actual consent.

Whatever interference the government undertakes – whether it is new taxes, new regulations, new prohibitions, new laws, or worse – is seemingly justified since I merely continue living within the United States. I could even say, “No, I don’t agree to this new law.” It doesn’t matter so say the social contract theorists – I live here and that’s the rules.

However, this argument quickly becomes paradoxical. My implicit consent would only be valid if the government owned all territory – if I merely moved in and rented citizenship. In that case, the contract would be valid.

But since the government doesn’t own all this territory to begin with, they have no claim to demand obedience. I own my body and my labor. I don’t have to answer to any external authority for merely existing. Simply being born does not count as consent to any government.

If my lack of consent and support wasn’t enough, now I have to pay over $2,000 simply to leave the country. To the social engineer, my options are stay where I am, and consent to all the nonsensical, immoral, and ineffective government laws, or pay a fine so I can move freely.  For the bureaucrats and the politicians, I don’t own myself. I’m merely a pawn for them to manipulate. Whatever I do using my own volition is simply what they allow me to do.

Now, because they are low on funds that I didn’t consent to giving them in the first place, they are holding me hostage: “Do what we say or give us a $2,000 payoff – then you’re free to leave.”

In reality, there is no social contract. I never consented to having my money stolen, my voluntary exchanges interfered with, my phone to be spied on, my garden to be regulated, the contents of my refrigerator to be restricted, or any other nonsensical imposition the jerks in Washington enact next.

I don’t want to follow inane rules or pay a giant fine. Is that so much to ask? Apparently.

So while the government continues to limit our freedoms in ways we never agreed to, contrary to their assumed implicit consent, they will continually hike the price of escaping their despotic grip. Never before has the myth of the social contract been so vital to demolish.

When the day finally comes where people recognize the preposterousness of the social contract, civilization will be grounded in exchanges that rely on actual, visible, and identifiable consent – the bedrocks of a free market and a free society, rather than the lack of consent taken to be implied consent that governments currently rely on to wield massive power.