What happens when you are born into a COLA?

A community of legal agreement (COLA) is nothing more than a contract between an individual and everyone else who has signed that specific contract in one area.

It uses what I call a transitive provision to enable this ability. It allows you to sign a contract with one person, but have that contract extended with an entire city potentially.

This allows a whole city to exist on a single contractual basis, and by that means to lay down the rules of the interaction in that city; establishing all the private law that a city needs to operate smoothly. It is, in short, a decentralized replacement for a legislature, it obviates a legislature, it allows for decentralized law production.

All of this means that to even enter a COLA you must sign the agreement. So how are children handled in a COLA agreement?

This is actually something that the COLA agreement itself must deal with. Since COLA agreements can be made by anyone, the real question is what rules for children would you yourself find reasonable? Because you could likely find a COLA that catered to that ideal.

As for me, the way I think reasonable is that the COLA agreement will allow children to enter a COLA under the contractual aegis of their parents, and parents will be responsible for them in all ways. This is no radical departure from how we order the family in current society.

The different is when these children become adults. When and how is, again, up to definition in the COLA contract. But there is one key feature that should not be left out, and that is that children must sign the COLA agreement themselves upon reaching adulthood and thus being responsible for their own contractual obligations. Children must not simply be considered to have joined the COLA and to thereby have authority exercised over them that they did not consent to.

This necessity is in fact implied by the nature of the COLA contract and private law itself, which is always a contract between two or more people.

If a child grew up and did not sign the COLA contract, it would become diffcult to sue them or expect them to hold to the laws of the COLA, since they are not signatories to the COLA city's basic agreement. A merchant sues them and the judge finds out there's no COLA agreement between the merchant and the young-adult, and he throws the case out right there.

So in this way private law and private society would be very different from the current lie that is the implied social contract which is no contract at all, but rather one of the biggest deceptions ever invented, and one which allows a great deal of tyranny to exist.

Private law and the necessity of opting-in in a private law society would mean that it would be impossible for anyone to force bad laws on anyone else, as you could simply leave and join a different COLA, or even create your own.

As for children, law would finally have an expiration date, because law that is actually private contract would live and die with each person and need to be renewed with each young generation, resulting in continual re-examination of existing law, and the tossing out of that which is no longer useful.

The fact that we currently live under perpetual law with no expiration date is another horrid flaw of modern democracies that needs to be dispensed with.