On Tue, Feb 02, 2016 at 07:35:09AM +1100, Greg Chalik wrote:
> Doug, its not possible to make a contract with individuals who
> hadn't born born yet.

People sell things that they might otherwise have left to their
children all the time.

However, the condition of being a subject of some state is not a
contract.  People born into it have it whether they would have chosen
it or not.  It is well accepted that people do get to choose this for
their descendants.  Some people may later choose to renounce it, with
varying degrees of success.

It may be interesting to consider a Traveller world, or perhaps even a
larger area, where membership of some state or other is in fact
treated as a contract -- one that must be explicitly negotiated upon
reaching maturity, and is only automatic while children are legally
dependent upon parents, guardians, or other social structures for
child-raising.  This has come up in setting material for various forms
of fiction, but I haven't really seen it treated well anywhere.

> Even if every adult in the four living generations agree to the
> sale, if things turn sour, someone two or three generations later
> will say, ''we never made such a contract, so its not binding''.

That happens with more ordinary property sales as well, only it's more
obviously treated as crap in that case.  There have been cases of "my
grandfather had no right to sell the family land, so it still belongs
to me", but only in pretty extreme cases does anyone else agree.

I expect that inheriting the benefits of their grandparents being paid
for changing statehood is less likely to lead directly to violence
than their having been forced to do so under threat of death or
imprisonment, along with the actual deaths and destruction that
usually accompany such things.

Of course, if things turn sour with a planet full of people then they
may well add any excuses to rebel, no matter how flimsy.

- Tim