Lysander Spooner

This pretence, that the law is a part of the contract, is a mere trick to cheat people out of their natural right to make their own contracts; and to compel them to make only such contracts as the lawmakers choose to permit them to make.

In short, they may take any man's property, and give it, or sell it, to whom they please, and on such conditions, and at such prices, as they please; without any regard to the rights of the owner.

They may, in fact, at their pleasure, strip any, or every, man of his property, and bestow it upon whom they will; and then justify the act upon the presumption that the owner consented to have his property thus taken from him and given to…

This absurd, contemptible, and detestable trick has had a long lease of life, and has been used as a cover for some of the greatest of crimes.

But, not content with having always sanctioned the unlimited power of the State lawmakers to abolish all men's natural right to make their own contracts, the Supreme Court of the United States has, within the last twenty years, taken pains…

It has asserted the arbitrary power of congress to abolish all men's right to make their own contracts, by asserting its power to alter the meaning of all contracts, after they are made, so as to make them widely, or wholly, different from…

But it then asserts that congress has this additional, and wholly different, power, to wit, the power to declare that this alteration in the value of the coins shall work a corresponding change in all existing contracts for the payment of…

They assert that, by simply retaining the name, while altering the thing,--or by simply giving an old name to a new thing,--congress has power to utterly abolish the contract which the parties themselves entered into, and substitute for it…

But the obligation of a contract to pay money is to pay that which the law shall recognize as money when the payment is to be made.--Legal Tender Cases, 12 Wallace 548.

This is saying that the obligation of a contract to pay money is not an obligation to pay what both the law and the parties recognize as money, at the time when the contract is made, but only such substitute as congress shall afterwards…

Both these opinions are distinct declarations of the power of congress to alter men's contracts, after they are made, by simply retaining the name, while altering the thing, that is agreed to be paid.

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.