Thomas Paine said it best.

"It has been thought," he wrote in The Rights of Man in 1791, "...that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed; but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: And this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist."