Lysander Spooner

You have not so much as the honest, responsible scratch of one single pen, to justify you in the exercise of the power you have taken upon yourself to exercise.

You evidently believe that the men who made those laws were duly authorized to make them; and that you yourself have been duly authorized to enforce them.

Did folly, falsehood, absurdity, assumption, or criminality ever reach a higher point than that?

You evidently believe that justice is no law at all, unless in cases where the lawmakers may chance to prefer it to any law which they themselves can invent.

And all the laws they make are based upon the assumption that they have now become invested with rights that are more than human, and that those, on whom their laws are to operate, have lost even their human rights.

They are just as false and absurd as it would be to say that they are protecting the public health, by arbitrarily poisoning and destroying the health of single individuals.

And these separate, individual rights all rest upon, and can be ascertained only by, the one science of justice.

And the protection of these separate, individual rights is the one only legitimate purpose, for which anything in the nature of a governing, or coercive, power has a right to exist.

They are the only rights by which any man can protect his own property, liberty, or life against any one who may be disposed to take it away.

Any restriction upon the exercise of this right is a restriction upon his rightful power of providing for, and accomplishing, his own well-being.

It is a right indispensable to every man's highest happiness; and to every man's power of judging and determining for himself what will, and what will not, promote his happiness.

But the right of every man to do anything, and everything, which justice does not forbid him to do, is a natural, inherent, inalienable right.