In The Conscience of The Constitution, I use the analogy of a fishing hole to explain how the social compact works, or at least, is supposed to:
...in a world without regular, enforceable guidelines and institutions to define and enforce private rights (that is, in a “state of nature”), individual actors will strive to gain as much control over resources as they can. Take, for example, a fish pond. Each will try to hoard access to it, investing heavily in fencing it off and otherwise defending it against rivals, or in discovering ways to confiscate their rivals’ gains. Such investments divert attention away from more productive undertakings and are thus economically wasteful. Each person will also tend to over-exploit the resource, taking as many fish as possible because they cannot trust that others will not grab the remaining fish. In the absence of any authority to police each person’s rights, the race will go to the swift and the battle to the strong.
But if the people agree to a system of rules to govern legitimate claims—a contract, a set of mores, or a police system that protects every person’s right to fish in the pond—each will gain because he can reduce his inefficient investments (in predation or defending against predation) and can instead focus his energies on productive activity. Each fisherman is also less likely to over-exploit the resource since the police will guarantee the claims of rivals who are too poor or too weak or otherwise unable to enforce their own claims. Thus, in theory, a common system of rational rules improves economic efficiency by reducing wasteful expenditures in obtaining and defending resources. This is what makes the social compact rational.
Today I ran across this astonishingly vivid illustration of my point:
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