Buck111
VIP Member
Everything below has been copied and pasted from Heroes of Liberty on Facebook. I take no credit for any of it.
I wish you all wellness, happiness, knowledge and true freedom.
Half of you are applauding that it's finally Lysander Spooner's turn, as he's one of the greatest, most influential advocates of liberty in all of history. If so, be sure to share this, because the other half are embarrassingly ignorant of this hero's very existence, much moreso his tremendous impact on freedom of all types, for people of all colors.
Without Spooner, slavery's hold would have been stronger. He helped originate the powerful Nullification movement that crippled support of slavery in the North, he defended escaped slaves in court, and wrote the most important book arguing that slavery was, itself, unconstitutional.
But, Spooner was a rare example of a principled man. While he supported the use of violence to end slavery, but he was against using it to force people to be ruled by a government they opposed, while maintaining slavery, as Lincoln promised to do. He became one of the leading Abolitionist opponents of Lincoln and the Republican party, which actually maintained that slavery was legal and would be perpetuated into the foreseeable future, but which used brutal tactics to crush the legal secession of member states.
This led Spooner to write one of the greatest missives on the right to self-government of all times, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority.
In it, Spooner demonstrated, logically and in legal terms, how the US Constitution could not be used to justify the conquest of seceding states, that in fact it could not be said to impose chains metaphorical OR real on anyone, white or black, but could only apply to those who actively consented to it.
"If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them."
— No Treason #1
"The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat."
— No Treason #4: The Constitution of No Authority
"The science of mine and thine — the science of justice — is the science of all human rights; of all a man’s rights of person and property; of all his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
— Natural Law; or The Science of Justice
"The ancient maxim makes the sum of a man’s legal duty to his fellow men to be simply this: 'To live honestly, to hurt no one, to give to every one his due.'"
"Certainly no man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire."
"“A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters."
— No Treason #4: The Constitution of No Authority
"No government, so called, can reasonably be trusted for a moment, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support."
"A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man...calling himself a robber, or by millions, calling themselves a government."
— No Treason #1
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist."
I wish you all wellness, happiness, knowledge and true freedom.
Half of you are applauding that it's finally Lysander Spooner's turn, as he's one of the greatest, most influential advocates of liberty in all of history. If so, be sure to share this, because the other half are embarrassingly ignorant of this hero's very existence, much moreso his tremendous impact on freedom of all types, for people of all colors.
Without Spooner, slavery's hold would have been stronger. He helped originate the powerful Nullification movement that crippled support of slavery in the North, he defended escaped slaves in court, and wrote the most important book arguing that slavery was, itself, unconstitutional.
But, Spooner was a rare example of a principled man. While he supported the use of violence to end slavery, but he was against using it to force people to be ruled by a government they opposed, while maintaining slavery, as Lincoln promised to do. He became one of the leading Abolitionist opponents of Lincoln and the Republican party, which actually maintained that slavery was legal and would be perpetuated into the foreseeable future, but which used brutal tactics to crush the legal secession of member states.
This led Spooner to write one of the greatest missives on the right to self-government of all times, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority.
In it, Spooner demonstrated, logically and in legal terms, how the US Constitution could not be used to justify the conquest of seceding states, that in fact it could not be said to impose chains metaphorical OR real on anyone, white or black, but could only apply to those who actively consented to it.
"If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them."
— No Treason #1
"The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat."
— No Treason #4: The Constitution of No Authority
"The science of mine and thine — the science of justice — is the science of all human rights; of all a man’s rights of person and property; of all his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
— Natural Law; or The Science of Justice
"The ancient maxim makes the sum of a man’s legal duty to his fellow men to be simply this: 'To live honestly, to hurt no one, to give to every one his due.'"
"Certainly no man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire."
"“A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters."
— No Treason #4: The Constitution of No Authority
"No government, so called, can reasonably be trusted for a moment, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support."
"A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man...calling himself a robber, or by millions, calling themselves a government."
— No Treason #1
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist."
