Lysander Spooner

All other so-called rights of sovereignty are simply the usurpations of impostors, conspirators, robbers, tyrants, and murderers.

This is the only natural right of sovereignty, that was ever known among men.

And the question was never settled, until it was settled at the cost of a million of lives, and some ten thousand millions of money.

And if the constitution of the United States intended to assert the contrary, it was simply an audacious lie--a lie as foolish as it was audacious--that should have covered with infamy every man who helped to frame the constitution, or…

This mistaken idea was, in some measure, excusable in that day, when reason and experience had not demonstrated, to their minds, the utter incompatibility of all lawmaking whatsoever with men's natural rights.

They apparently cannot conceive of such a thing as a people's establishing a government as a means of preserving their personal liberty and rights.

They seem never to have heard of the Declaration of Independence, nor of any other declaration of the natural rights of human beings.

The governments of Europe, acting through the monarch, or the legislature, according to the distribution of powers under their respective constitutions, had, and have, as sovereign a power of issuing paper money as of stamping coin.

It is not doubted that the power to establish a standard of value, by which all other values may be measured, or, in other words, to determine what shall be lawful money and a legal tender, is in its nature, and of necessity, a…

And they kept great standing armies, and hordes of pimps, spies, and ruffians, to keep the people in subjection.

And they taught, and a servile and corrupt priesthood taught, that it was a religious duty of the people to obey them.

The governments spurned the idea that they were dependent on the will or consent of their people for their political power.