The notion that WalMart is breaking some unwritten "social contract" by not embracing the political agenda of the AFL-CIO is a good example of the fraud perpetrated by all social contract theories. A while back Hans Hoppe sent me an unpublished article on the topic by Murray Rothbard that is in his collected papers. It was a 1961 assessment of the yet-to-be-published book, The Calculus of Consent, by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. Buchanan would win the Nobel Prize based partly on that book 25 years later.

The Calculus of Consent posits a "conservative" social contract theory. But Rothbard saw through it. As he wrote:

"A 'social contract' theory of government . . . can be used to place a stamp of approval on all, or most, of the actions of the existing government (for example, Rousseau). Thus, the theory of the divine right of kings began as a check on government, as an order to the King to stay within divinely-commanded laws; it was transformed, by the State, into a divine stamp of approval for anything the King might decide to do."

Walter Block and I expand upon this critique of The Calculus of Consent in "Is Voluntary Government Possible? A Critique of Constitutional Economics," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, vol. 156 (2000), pp. 567-582.