Commentary
In a free society, contracts do a great deal of heavy lifting. You do this and I’ll do that, always to our mutual benefit. When a dispute arises, an arbiter can check the words to see who is in breach. If some party has failed to comply with the terms, he or she pays a financial penalty. That’s fine as far as it goes. Everything is voluntary.
But there are limits to what contracts can do. For example, even in a financial pinch, you cannot sell yourself into slavery. That is to say, you cannot voluntarily surrender your human volition under all conditions and with no limit in time. We didn’t need the 13th Amendment to make the point but still it is there: no involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime….