Lysander Spooner: “Is there a government on earth that rests upon a more false, absurd, or tyrannical basis than that?”

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.

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.

They cannot claim or expect that the whole people shall practise the folly of taking on trust their pretended superior knowledge, and of committing blindly into their hands all their own interests, liberties, and rights, to be disposed of…