There are three ways for a person to obtain something of value from another person: receive it as a donation, steal it by force or fraud, or exchange for it. It’s not much of an oversimplification to say that the advance of civilization has hinged on its movement from the first two methods to the third. The right to exchange, and the right to promise as part of a future exchange—the right to contract—are now taken for granted, but those rights are delicate and a whole complex of rights, assumptions, and obligations are subsumed by them. Their intellectual foundations are being undermined as the equality of rights implicit in contract and exchange gives way to a regressive inequality of rights: servitude.

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