On this, Constitution Day, I thought it would be important to highlight Lysander Spooner’s treatise “The Constitution of No Authority,” which makes a number of salient insights into the nature of the so-called law of the land.

1. The Constitution is in no way binding in any legal way on anyone but the men who wrote it.
2. Therefore, the government it created has no authority over anyone but the men who wrote the constitution.
3. Everyone who wrote the constitution is dead, so no one is legally bound to follow the constitution or any entity that it created.
4. A person cannot prove he or she took any oath to the constitution under his or her own free because no one may legally administer the oath.
5. Voting in elections does not bind one to the constitution, as the ballots cast are secret and no one can prove whom he or she supported.
6. Paying taxes is not a mode of consent because they are paid under the penalty of force.
7. Actions taken taken under duress or not intentional are not legally binding.
8. Therefore, government officials are nothing more than impostors and thieves.
9. Their laws are just the pretend scribbles of the pretend government.
10. The same facts apply to every other nation that has ever existed.
11. Government officials, in reality, are the pawns of industrialists and bankers.
12. Therefore, the world is ruled by bands of money lenders, tyrants, murderers.

Whether you accept Spooner’s reasoning or not, this much of what he said about the constitution is true: “That it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it.”

• "An Illegitimate Republic: The Moral Case Against a Republic"
• "Some Questions About a Republic"
• "Glossary"
• "For Rules, Not Rulers"
• "A Minarchist’s Case for Open Immigration"