In other words, the court means to say that, after a contract has been made for the payment of a certain number of dollars, congress has power to alter the meaning of the word dollar, and thus authorize the debtor to pay in something…
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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Well, if congress has power to alter men's contracts, after they are made, by altering the meaning of the word dollar, and thus reducing the value of the debt, it has a precisely equal power to increase the value of the dollar, and thus…
Congress has evidently just as much right to increase the value of the dollar, after a contract has been made, as it has to reduce its value.
It has, therefore, just as much right to cheat debtors, by compelling them to pay more than they agreed to pay, as it has to cheat creditors, by compelling them to accept less than they agreed to accept.
All this talk of the court is equivalent to asserting that congress has the right to alter men's contracts at pleasure, after they are made, and make them over into something, or anything, wholly different from what the parties themselves…
And this is equivalent to denying all men's right to make their own contracts, or to acquire any contract rights, which congress may not afterward, at pleasure, alter, or abolish.
It is equivalent to saying that the words of contracts are not to be taken in the sense in which they are used, by the parties themselves, at the time when the contracts are entered into, but only in such different senses as congress may…
If this is not asserting the right of congress to abolish altogether men's natural right to make their own contracts, what is it?
Such an absurd contract would, in reality, be no legal contract at all.
A solvent contract to pay money is in reality--in law, and in equity--a bona fide mortgage upon the debtor's property.
And this mortgage right is as veritable a right of property, as is any right of property, that is conveyed by a warranty deed.
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.