Lysander Spooner

These governments (State and national) deny this natural right of buying and selling, etc., by arbitrarily prohibiting, or qualifying, all such, and so many, of these contracts, as they choose to prohibit, or qualify.

The prohibition, or qualification, of any one of these contracts--that are intrinsically just and lawful--is a denial of all individual natural right to make any of them.

For the right to make any and all of them stands on the same grounds of natural law, natural justice, and men's natural rights.

If a government has the right to prohibit, or qualify, any one of these contracts, it has the same right to prohibit, or qualify, all of them.

Therefore the assertion, by the government, of a right to prohibit, or qualify, any one of them, is equivalent to a denial of all natural right, on the part of individuals, to make any of them.

It is by this arbitrary power over contracts, that the monopoly of money is sustained.

Few people have any real perception of the power, which this monopoly gives to the holders of it, over the industry and traffic of all other persons.

And the one only purpose of the monopoly is to enable the holders of it to rob everybody else in the prices of their labor, and the products of their labor.

And this is the theory on which the governments of England and the United States have always, with immaterial exceptions, acted, in prohibiting all but such small amounts of money as they (the governments) should specially license.

And it is so manifestly a theory of pure robbery, that scarce a word can be necessary to make it more evidently so than it now is.

That to make all traffic just and equal, it is indispensable that, in each separate purchase and sale, the money paid should be a bona fide equivalent of the labor or property bought with it.

If the authority be vested in the government, the governmnt is absolute, and the people have no liberties except such as the government sees fit to indulge them with.