Whether it be considered as a price paid for a privilege, or a penalty for having exercised a natural right, it is a violation both of his natural right of property, and of his natural right to make a contract in that country.
Lysander Spooner: “Whether it be considered as a price paid for a privilege, or a penalty for having exercised a natural right, it is a…”
Editor's note · Context
He discusses how government fees can be seen as either a price for privilege or a penalty for exercising rights, both of which violate natural rights.
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The people are no more arrayed against themselves, when a jury puts its veto upon a statute, which the other tribunals have sanctioned, than they are when the same veto is exercised by the representatives, the senate, the executive, or the…
Juries would refuse to enforce a tax against a man who had never agreed to pay it.
And yet these reasons, which are really no reasons at all, are the only ones, so far as I know, that have ever been offered for this absurd and brutal doctrine.
It was simply, that they would neither convict the innocent, nor acquit the guilty.