{"id":186,"date":"2009-06-30T18:01:16","date_gmt":"2009-06-30T22:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/?p=186"},"modified":"2011-01-01T16:16:54","modified_gmt":"2011-01-01T20:16:54","slug":"where-i-got-the-name-for-this-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/?p=186","title":{"rendered":"Where I got the name for this blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

One inspiration was Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another inspiration is the basic libertarian idea that the agents-without-principals who make up the State have no more authority to violate natural rights than anyone else does, so that when State agents do what would be a crime if committed by anyone else they too act criminally. (Hence, the libertarian proposition that “taxation is theft.”) Many of them in a just world should themselves be defendants.<\/p>\n

Today I randomly encountered online another of my inspirations for the name “People v. State,” in this comment thread<\/a> on Mark Bennett’s Defending People blog. Here’s the exchange:<\/p>\n

John Kindley<\/a><\/cite> says:<\/span><\/p>\n

26 June 2009 at 12:51 pm<\/a><\/div>\n

I prefer the definitional framework conceived by Lysander Spooner in the first chapter<\/a> of his treatise The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, titled \u201cWhat is Law?\u201d Here\u2019s a paragraph that gives some of the flavor:<\/p>\n

Natural law, then, is the paramount law. And, being the paramount law, it is necessarily the only law: for, being applicable to every possible case that can arise touching the rights of men, any other principle or rule, that should arbitrarily be applied to those rights, would necessarily conflict with it. And, as a merely arbitrary, partial and temporary rule must, of necessity, be of less obligation than a natural, permanent, equal and universal one, the arbitrary one becomes, in reality, of no obligation at all, when the two come in collision. Consequently there is, and can be, correctly speaking, no law but natural law. There is no other principle or rule, applicable to the rights of men, that is obligatory in comparison with this, in any case whatever. And this natural law is no other than that rule of natural justice, which results either directly from men\u2019s natural rights, or from such acquisitions as they have a natural right to make, or from such contracts as they have a natural right to enter into.<\/p>\n

Reply<\/a><\/div>\n