I actually think we agree on an awful lot as the discussion elaborates. But I think there are some key distinctions in how we frame the same issues.

>elected by a narrow majority of his fellow slaves.

In the US at least, we already have checks and balances that avoid the tyranny of the majority.

Nor would it matter that he could leave to another plantation with a different master whose whip stings just the same.

In this case, it only holds if the assumption is that any social arrangement devolves into a master/slave relationship. Why hold onto this assumption if we've already said the "slave" is free to go as well as determine who runs the plantation? To me, that's sounds more like an egalitarian arrangement than a master/slave one. Maybe this is where the slave/master analogy has its limits.

>Does your consent matter? Will revoking your consent be respected by other parties involved?

Yes, consent matters. But I think this may be one of the fundamental areas where we disagree. I think the complexity of society requires numerous implied consents, I get the impression you only favor explicit consent. My larger point is that explicit consent is impossible in a complex society. When I get onto a public road, I do not get explicit consent from the 300+ million citizens who helped pay for that road. Likewise with most of the other social arrangements. The Founding Fathers understood this as well; Washington was a notorious disciplinarian who did not look for consent from individual soldiers regarding their willingness to continue serving because there is a pragmatic limit to instances of individual consent. Soldiers in today's army literally sign a contract and they don't get to revoke that consent merely because they've changed their mind about their willingness to uphold that agreement when things get hard. This is very similar to the idea of the social contract except one is explicit because it's relatively narrow in scope while one is implicit because of the complexity of the context in which it operates.

>These are the axioms I'm starting from. If we're all created equal, and we are all entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (in that order), does everything else not follow? You'll also note that "a baseline quality of life" is not present in this list.

I mean, Jefferson wrote beautifully in the Declaration of Independence but the actual social contact is the Constitution. And within that, the federal government has specific enumerated powers, including using those specific powers for the "general welfare" of the citizens (Article I, Section 8, Clause 1). This general welfare is exactly the quality of life I'm talking about. Also note that a right to property is not in your axioms. Now I'm assuming, from your perspective, this is implied by the right to liberty. My other main point is that rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin. If we have implied rights protected by society, we also have implied responsibilities to said society.

>there are several layers of due process that are in place exactly to prevent punitive action for reasonable violations of the law

This is actually speaking to my point that they are general principles and not hard-lined ideologies. You've indicated you have a hierarchy of rights, starting with the right to life and that lesser rights are subjugate to that primacy (like the right to property, like the flag pole). I agree. So it sounds like we agree that liberty isn't absolute in a society where interactions between rights have to be balanced and that some rights are subjugate to others.

>collaborating at Airbus to build an A380 are cooperating splendidly without being forced to

I agree. But the complexity of the operation means they aren't knowledgeable regarding every operation. The complexity actually makes certain conventions necessary. A software engineer may have little or no clue what a structural engineer is doing. They coordinate by creation of social orders and delegation of duties. It's the same thing we do in order to make a complex society work; we sacrifice explicit consent by delegating authority to people like political representatives. The SWE doesn't get to explicitly approve the decision of Airbus to sell military equipment. We build a system of implied consent to manage the complexity of interactions.

Sorry, I did misinterpret what you had previously wrote. Thank you for correcting me.

>Most of everyone else seems to be wired to derive misery from the fact they do not occupy such a place.

Roosevelt said "Comparison is the thief of joy" and I tend to agree with both of you. I do think this is where those balances to counteract the tyranny of the majority come in.

>The Jeffersonian homestead is the perfect example of functional liberty.

I think we agree here. But one of my main points is that this isn't practical in today's society. As romantic of a notion that it is, I think it's really just a hypothetical indulgence rather than a pragmatic approach to policy. I doubt many people in US would like to return to an agrarian economy because, even though it might have more principled liberty, it would lower their quality of life. That ship sailed over a hundred years ago when America decided to become an global superpower and integrated into a worldwide economy. You can get awfully close to a libertarian ideal by joining a hunter-gatherer society, so why don't people do so? My premise is that nation-states evolved as a social response to the risks of a increasingly complex society. I think the libertarian thought experiments are fun but not particularly useful.