It is plain, therefore, that if the people have invested the government with power to make laws that absolutely bind the people, and to punish the people for transgressing those laws, the people have surrendered their liberties…
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.
gutenberg.org
Discussion can do nothing to prevent the enactment, or procure the repeal, of unjust laws, unless it be understood that, the discussion is to be followed by resistance.
Tyrants care nothing for discussions that are to end only in discussion.
Discussions, which do not interfere with the enforcement of their laws, are but idle wind to them.
Be sides, when the suffrage is exercised, it gives no guaranty for the repeal of existing laws that are oppressive, and no security against the enactment of new ones that are equally so.
The second body of legislators are liable and likely to be just as tyrannical as the first.
If it be said that the second body may be chosen for their integrity, the answer is, that the first were chosen for that very reason, and yet proved tyrants.
The second will be exposed to the same temptations as the first, and will be just as likely to prove tyrannical.
Who ever heard that succeeding legislatures were, on the whole, more honest than those that preceded them?
The right of suffrage, therefore, and even a change of legislators, guarantees no change of legislation certainly no change for the better.
Even if a change for the better actually comes, t cmes too late, because it comes only after more or less injustice has been irreparably done.
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.