6 Responses to Where Is Lysander Spooner When We Need Him?

  1. Tom March 7, 2013 at 1:30 pm #

    In the ground where he should be. He was a reactionary that failed to understand the constitutions and could only find that it was at fault not the people behind it. I find it amazing how many people get suckered into this old dusty fart and I would speculate that most of the observants here have nevere really read the Constitution to really know what’s in it. I cede the point it is not a perfect document because it was put together by man which makes us all falable.

    • Roderick March 7, 2013 at 4:32 pm #

      Oh yeah. a reactionary — like most abolitionists and anarchists.

      • Roderick March 7, 2013 at 9:58 pm #

        I would speculate that most of the observants here have nevere really read the Constitution to really know what’s in it.

        I’ll take that bet.

        Anyway, my subject title has nothing to do with Spooner’s criticisms of the Constitution.

  2. Tom March 7, 2013 at 1:31 pm #

    Oh! Don’t bother with a comment. It is not likely I will ever be back here.

    • Roderick March 7, 2013 at 9:59 pm #

      Well, do come back if you ever come up with an argument.

  3. Adam Cicco March 8, 2013 at 2:17 am #

    Well, that is certainly an…. odd viewpoint Tom.

    Since you’ve already admitted your comments were of the hit and run sort, this is probably a useless question… but how exactly was Lysander Spooner a reactionary? Sure, he held some views (property theory, patents and copyrights, “natural rights” etc.) that his contemporaries in the radical community disagreed with him on. Yet, I am still baffled as to why a radical abolitionist (who attempted with Brown to incite an armed insurrection among slaves against their white “masters”), anarchist, opponent of capitalism, who confronted the machinery of the State head on… is a reactionary?

    From what I can discern from you comment… this has something to do with him rejecting the Constitution? By the by, if one actually reads Spooner’s works about the US Constitution, one would find he takes in to account the writers and signers of it into consideration. Quite a bit actually, it’s sort of a major part of the point he makes about who, if anyone, would be bound by it.

    So, and correct me if I am mistaken, your viewpoint appears to be that anyone who rejects the constitution (or rejects it “wholesale”, so to speak, is a reactionary, or reactionary-inclined? Again, I’m not sure this is you position, but if it is… frankly, that is ridiculous.

    Pretty much all radicals, anarchists, and fellow-travelers reject the US Constitution (and all other similar documents). That whole “non-consensual, non-mutual, violence-enforced, binding contract upon people who live within the politically demarcated borders of what is called ‘the United States of America’, regardless of whether or not they consented to it, and regardless of whether or not they have been born yet; setting up an increasingly centralized political and socioeconomic system” thing. Yeah, that whole “thing”. It tends to go against the views and fundamental beliefs of all anarchists and radicals I know, or have heard of.

    The only “reactionaries” that I can imagine that would also reject the US Constitution (or other similar liberal-capitalist state constitutions) would be the hard-right Monarchists , Theocrats, and modern Plutocrats. It should be obvious that the objections form such people are of a totally different sort than the reasoning behind radical rejection of the US Constitution. But again, that does not sound like Lysander Spooner at all.

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