And being everywhere and always the supreme law, it is necessarily everywhere and always the only law.
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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It is also, at all times, and in all places, the supreme law.
It does not derive its authority from the commands, will, pleasure, or discretion of any possible combination of men, whether calling themselves a government, or by any other name.
Let me then remind you that justice is an immutable, natural principle; and not anything that can be made, unmade, or altered by any human power.
On the other hand, the principle of no taxation without consent would sustain the trial by the country, because men in general would not consent to be taxed for the support of a government under which trial by the country was not secured.
In these two ways, then, trial by the country would sustain the principle of no taxation without consent. 2.
They would also protect men in forcibly resisting the collection of taxes to which they had never consented.
Juries would refuse to enforce a tax against a man who had never agreed to pay it.
They mutually sustain each other; and neither can stand without the other.
Trial by the country, and no taxation without consent, were the two pillars of English liberty, (when England had any liberty,) and the first principles of the Common Law.
If he do not desire it, or do not bargain for it, the government has no more right than any other insurance company to impose it upon him, or make him pay for it.
It is for himself to decide whether he desires such protection as the government offers him.