In the January 27th ZGBlog Chains of Authority, I referred to Lysander Spooner's magnificent paper, The Constitution of No Authority. I hope you followed the link and read it - or if not that you will now; it takes a mere quarter hour. Spooner was a lawyer in Massachussets, wrote it in 1869, and demolished the fiction that the Federal Government was properly chartered to exist.

He offers several lines of reasoning to prove his case, the most important being that those who "purported" to ratify the charter that brought the FedGov into being could do so only with respect to themselves; that is, the persons then living, in 1789. It was a contract, and the fundamental requirement of any contract is that it shall bind only those who sign it. The corollary is that any who do not sign it are not bound.

He then observes that not one of those who assented to the contract was still alive at the time of his writing. Not one. And of course, they still aren't. Hence the Constitution and the FedGov it seemed to entitle to exist, now has no valid power over anyone at all.

The Preamble (We the People...) includes words about the Posterity of those ratifying the contract, which Spooner addresses well by pointing out that there is no way they could possibly bind their children and descendants - and so that they were merely expressing a sincere hope that the new arrangement would bring them "union, safety, tranquility, liberty, etc." He likened that to a man building a fine house, which he hoped would prove of value to his descendants; and to a "man says he is planting a tree for himself and his posterity, he does not mean to be understood as saying that he has any thought of compelling them'' to eat its fruit. He simply hopes that they will.

Spooner also ridiculed the notion that the chartered FedGov could rule everyone in America when only as few as a tenth or even a twentieth of the population was even entitled to vote.

There's much more, and it's tightly reasoned. But the "small omission" of the title here is that those who voted to ratify the proposed Constitution did so only as a majority, of perhaps as many as 3 to 2 according to CoPilot. But what of those who voted against it? By Spooner's own eloquent argument, those cannot possibly be held to have approved, or therefore to have been bound by, its terms.

No more than you or I, who also never even signed the contract.

A further twist on his omission is that individual people didn't get to vote at all! - the ratifying was done by delegates. Here's CoPilot:

Each state held a special ratifying convention, and delegates—not the general public—voted on ratification.

So the persons to be affected by the contract never actually signed it! By Spooner's estimable reasoning, therefore, nobody who has ever been affected by its terms ever got to sign it - in 1788 or now.

Yet ever since, this monstrous organization has ruled with ever-increasing ferocity, 100% of Us the People, just as if we had.

All Spooner's excellent reasoning is additional, of course, to what appeared on January 27th here; even if in 1788 all American individuals had unanimously voted to endorse the Constitution, it would still have been invalid for the separate reason that the authority they were delegating was not theirs to delegate! There is therefore no escaping the conclusion that instituting the FedGov was the biggest swindle ever perpetrated on the human race.

For all this scandalous and abject failure and deception, every other government in the world is worse yet; for none of them emerged from the swamp with even the pretense of design and endorsement by those they were to govern.

About the recent ZGBlog A War Update: a couple of years ago I noticed a few things that the Putin government could usefully do to improve Russia, and wrote a short paper, How to Make Russia Even Better.

I can't say that its suggestions have borne fruit, yet. Readers with contacts in Russia could spread word of it in the hope that it soon will.