Men would then have known exactly how much of certain metals they were buying, selling, and promising to pay.
Lysander Spooner
The Public Record
Lysander Spooner was an American abolitionist, entrepreneur, lawyer, essayist, natural rights legal theorist, pamphleteer, political philosopher, and writer often associated with the Boston anarchist tradition.
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The coins would then have been regarded as only so much metal; and as having only the same value as the same amount of metal in any other form.
And it would undoubtedly have been far better if all coins--whether coined by governments or individuals--had all been made into pieces bearing simply the names of pounds, ounces, pennyweights, etc., and containing just the amounts of pure…
The power itself is a frivolous one, of little or no utility; for the weighing and assaying of metals is a thing so easily done, and can be done by so many different persons, that there is certainly no necessity for its being done at all…
It is no power to impose any restrictions whatever upon any or all other honest money, that may be offered in the market, and bought and sold in competition with the coins weighed and assayed by the government.
And none but corrupt and rotten congresses and courts would ever think of practising such a cheat.
On such reasoning as this, it would follow that the power of congress to tax money, and all other property, is a power to prohibit all money, and all other property; and thus to establish monopolies in favor of all such money, and all such…
The court says, in effect, that this provision gives congress power to establish the present monopoly of money; that the power to tax all other money, is a power to prohibit all other money; and a power to prohibit all other money is a…
And none but a congress of usurpers, robbers, and swindlers would ever think of using it for that purpose.
It no more authorizes taxation for the purpose of establishing monopolies of any kind whatever, than it does for taking openly and boldly all the property of the many, and giving it outright to a few.
This provision plainly authorizes no taxation whatever, except for the raising of revenue to pay the debts and legitimate expenses of the government.
On what constitutional grounds--that is, on what provisions found in the constitution itself--does the court profess to give its sanction to such a crime?