
No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1870) - tux
https://readtext.org/misc/no-treason-constitution/
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Animats
Oh, that. Lysander Spooner, 1867. See [1]. It's a reaction to the Civil War.

The philosophy of the U.S. Constitution is discussed better in the Federalist
Papers. It's a design document (unlike the Declaration of Independence), put
together by people who wanted a system that would work. They didn't want a
king (well, Hamilton did); they'd just gotten rid of one. They didn't want a
loose association requiring unanimous consent like the Articles of
Confederation (or, later, the United Nations); they'd tried that. They didn't
want anarchy or dictatorship of the majority; the French Revolution wasn't
going well. They didn't want it to be too weak, allowing Britain to come back
in and reconquer. (Britain tried in 1812. The British Army got far enough to
capture and burn the Capitol before they were pushed back.) Given those design
constraints, the authors of the Constitution came up with something rather
good.

As for anarchy: see "Failed State". You don't want to live there.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Treason](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Treason)

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programmarchy
To clarify, Lysander Spooner was an abolitionist. There's a delightful twist
to his argumentation, so don't write him off as merely a racist confederate by
the parent's selective regurgitation of eight grade public education history.

And the Federalist Papers are a rather dry rehash of the Divine Right of
Kings, dressed up in the language of protecting individual rights in order to
dupe a newly freed people into accepting a new, better-disguised oligarchy. In
my opinion, the philosophy of the U.S. Constitution is much better discussed
in Spooner's "No Treason".

As for "Failed State", see every government in the history of mankind. Further
note the parent's blatant misunderstanding of anarchy by labeling it a state.
Anarchy is alive and well today, and always will be so long as free people
organize themselves.

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brightball
That's basically a writ of anarchy. By his reasoning virtually every
government structure in existence does not apply to the people who were born
after its formation because they simply didn't agree with it.

~~~
SwellJoe
And, what's so wrong with governments always needing the current and ongoing
consent of the governed?

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mwfunk
You effectively consent to being governed by continuing to live within the
national boundaries associated with the government associated with that
nation. I'm not expressing a judgement on whether or not that's the best
arrangement, but that is exactly how it works today.

What's the alternative, and how would you implement it? What would the upsides
to your plan be exactly? What would be the downsides (including negative
unintended consequences), and how would you address them? Would the upsides
outweigh the downsides? If not, you've answered your own question. But if so,
PLEASE tell humanity about it because we've been trying to figure this stuff
out for millennia!

~~~
SwellJoe
There's a wide variety of anarchist literature to choose from. I'm not the
best person to ask, though I definitely lean anarchist.

Noam Chomsky is among the most famous anarchists that is currently writing on
the subject, so his writing is likely a good introduction. David Graeber is
another. Both of those folks are coming at it from the left; others come to
anarchism or minarchism from the right, which is sometimes called libertarian
(with some caveats, as the word "libertarian" has been overloaded to the point
of being almost meaningless; I know people who call themselves "libertarian"
that support Trump's border wall, or gods' sake!) or voluntarist. Though,
left/right, in general, gets a little sketchy as a way to describe a political
belief system as the power of the state envisioned gets smaller and more
directly accountable to citizens.

~~~
cbd1984
> the power of the state envisioned gets smaller and more directly accountable
> to citizens.

Pure majoritarianism doesn't work, you know. It leads to grossly immoral
systems which destroy the rights of minorities. There needs to be larger
governments, governments not ruled by the local majority, which can step in to
curb the abuses an unchecked majoritarian government would otherwise get away
with.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> There needs to be larger governments, governments not ruled by the local
> majority, which can step in to curb the abuses an unchecked majoritarian
> government would otherwise get away with.

Changing the size of government doesn't fix any problem created by
majoritarianism. A larger government only makes it so that when the majority
gets it wrong, they get it wrong everywhere at once and there is nowhere left
to run.

~~~
cbd1984
A larger government is less likely to be ruled by the prejudices endemic to a
single region.

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AnthonyMouse
Bullocks. Almost nothing is region-exclusive. What you'll see instead is that
80% of the South and 35% of the North supported slavery, which when you
average them together you get the wrong answer. Then the federal government
passes the Fugitive Slave Act instead of letting every slave in Virginia
escape to Boston, which would have destroyed the institution faster and with a
lot less blood than Lincoln providing the catalyst for secession and war with
a blatantly undemocratic abuse of executive power.

That's how it goes. You can't expect the US Congress to do the right thing.
They pass the Fugitive Slave Act, the Defense of Marriage Act (signed by B.
Clinton), laws against abortion, laws favoring banks and coal companies at the
expense of the poor and workers, etc. Read Roe v. Wade. The court wanted to do
something that Congress wouldn't but they had no justification for doing it,
so they made one up. It's utterly contrived. Striking down DOMA was only
slightly less contrived (and 5-4 instead of 7-2), and only because modern
courts are getting so much better at contriving things due to all the
practice.

But the same Court gave us Dred Scott and Buck v. Bell and Bush v. Gore. The
same Office of the President gave us Hoover and Nixon and Bush Jr.

Gay couples are only happy today because Justice Kennedy is the swing vote,
but Kennedy was appointed by Reagan. If Reagan appointed somebody else then
DOMA is upheld and any state can ban same sex marriage. So we have a federal
government that will pass DOMA with a large bipartisan super-majority but
strike it down by the narrowest of margins, when we could have one that much
more clearly has no authority to be involved in the matter at all.

~~~
cbd1984
The Civil Rights Era wouldn't exist but for an active Federal Government
overruling state and local governments. Same with _Obergefell_ and similar
pro-GLBTQ laws and rulings.

Countries need a strong central government to overrule local governments ruled
by prejudice. To think otherwise is historically illiterate.

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dchest
Audio version: [https://mises.org/library/no-treason-constitution-no-
authori...](https://mises.org/library/no-treason-constitution-no-authority-0)

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X86BSD
My favorite Lysander quote, which has proven quite true:

"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is
certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or
has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist."

QFT.

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reptation
Yeah, because the founding document of the U.S. is not the Constitution but
the Articles of Confederation:
[http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2013/09/the-c...](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2013/09/the-
constitution-conspiracy/)

~~~
JoBrad
But the Constitution, once ratified, superceded and contravened most of the
Articles of Confederation.

