No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority

These notes are old and were written while reading — they don’t necessarily reflect my current views.

The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract be- tween man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. And the Constitution,80 far as it was their contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make obligatory upon their children.

To take a man’s property without his con- sent, and then to infer his consent because he attempts, by voting, to prevent that property from being used to his injury, is a very insufficient proof of his consent to support the Constitution. → The vote is not really voluntary then

As all the different votes are given secretly (by secret ballot), there is no legal means of knowing, from the votes themselves, votes for, and who against, the “constitution. Therefore voting affords no legal evidence that any particular individual supports the Constitution. And where there can be no legal evidence that any particular individual supports the Constitution, it cannot legally be said that anybody supports it.

The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.

If he presumes to say that he has never contracted with us to protect him, and that he wants none of our protection, say to him that that is our business, and not his; that we choose to protect him, whether he desires us to do so or not; and that we demand pay, too, for protecting him.

It comes down to the point that he doesn’t think that there can be a contract over individual rights that is not legitimated by the individuals.