Considering the fact that we know 99.9% of people blindly click through agreements, this is the way it should be. Companies should not be able to use the lack of careful reading of TOS/T&C to their benefit.
Should a company should be able to bury a clause in their ToS such as "by accepting this contract, you agree to forfeit to The Company your first born and every cent you ever make henceforth"? Of course not.
People should be able to knowingly enter into whatever contract they want. The problem is that (as I cited elsewhere) information/effort/payoff asymmetries makes such a scenario ripe for exploitation. Therefore it follows that regulations should constrain what can reasonably appear in a contract. One should not have to parse 100 pages of legalese just to make sure they're not tacitly agreeing to indentured servitude for the rest of their lives. If this were not the case, it would be painfully easy for unscrupulous business to bury unsavory claims under mountains of incomprehensible legalese. What regulation does is balance the scales in favor of consumers.
This does in fact follow from the fact that 99.9% of the public does not read and/or cannot comprehend every instance from the set of possible legal contracts.
People should be able to knowingly enter into whatever contract they want.
Glad you agree.
Should a company should be able to...
Contract theory is far more rich a subject than you realize. In your example, a rational theory of contract wouldn't be enforced based on mere promise, but would allow contracts to be broken so long as it puts both parties more or less back to where they were before. E.g., if you promise to paint my home for $100, but then you don't paint my home, I can't then enslave you and force you to paint the home, rather, I get my $100 back.
And who is there to enforce the various tenets of contract theory? The fact is, if certain clauses of a contract are enforceable through state action then the state can and should have a say in what clauses it will enforce. Simple as that.
It's clearly not as simple as that, since there is such a thing as tyranny and perversion of justice. Now, you may be the kind of person who would approve of what his government does, whatever it does, and you may even be in the majority, but that doesn't make you right. I also imagine that, like most people with such views, you have cognitive dissonance. I.e., there are some governments that you think should change their behavior, on moral grounds.
>It's clearly not as simple as that, since there is such a thing as tyranny and perversion of justice.
It would be helpful if you tied in statements like that to the main discussion thread so that I could respond in a meaningful way. As is stands you're not really making an argument so I can't respond to anything without guessing at the logical connection.
