Politics & Power Quote by Lysander Spooner

Trust, for Spooner, is not a sentimental virtue; it is a design problem. His line weaponizes a lawyerly premise: consent is the only reliable audit. The moment a government can fund itself through compulsion, he argues, it no longer needs to persuade, only to collect. “So called” is the tell, a small sneer that drains the word “government” of legitimacy and frames the state less as a guardian than as a brand name attached to coercion. The sentence is built like a trap: “reasonably” appears twice, as if he’s conceding calm common sense, while the conclusion is radical - honest purposes can’t be presumed unless support is voluntary.

The subtext is an indictment of taxation and, deeper still, of the social contract tradition that treats obedience as implied. Spooner wants to flip the burden of proof. Instead of citizens justifying dissent, power must justify itself continuously, by attracting willing participation the way any other association would. If it can’t, that’s not a failure of civic virtue; it’s evidence the project can’t survive without force.

Context matters: Spooner is writing in a 19th-century America that sold itself as a consent-based republic while enforcing slavery, conscription, and punitive federal power. His skepticism isn’t abstract misanthropy; it’s a response to a state that preached liberty and practiced domination. The line lands because it translates moral outrage into a crisp metric: if you have to make people pay and comply, you’ve already admitted you can’t earn their allegiance.