Truth from the past.

I have been mulling over an article I intended to write about the progression of the U.S. Government into the veritable police state that it is today and the multitudes of wrongs and outright crimes that have been committed in the name of “the State” and “security”. 
Instead, I found this article at work.  I was struck dumb.  Mr. Spooner lived entirely in the 19^th century and had a better grasp of the direction our government was headed then than most Americans do today.  His references are to the Civil War, which heralded the end of true liberty as well as States rights.
Read the following and apply it to your own knowledge of events and trends happening on the news and the net every day.

STATISM IS SLAVERY

            The question of treason is distinct from that of slavery, and is the same that it would have been, if free States, instead of slave States, had seceded.
            On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate salves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage, and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union.
            The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit, and support, a government that they do not want, and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.
            No principle; that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false that this, or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom.  Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established.  If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave.  And there is no difference, in principle— but only in degree— between political and chattel slavery.  The former, no less than the latter, denies a man’s ownership of himself and the products of his labor, and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure.
            Previous to the war, there were some grounds for saying that – in theory, at least, if not in practice – our government was a free one; that it rested on consent.  But nothing of that kind can be said now, if the principle on which the war was carried on by the North, is irrevocably established.
 
            If that principle be not the principle of the Constitution, the fact should be known.  If it be the principle of the Constitution, the Constitution itself should be at once overthrown.
            Notwithstanding all the proclamations we have made to mankind, within the last ninety years, that our government rests on consent, and that that was the rightful basis on which any government could rest, the late war has practically demonstrated that our government rests upon force – as much so as any government that ever existed.
            The North has thus virtually said to the world: It was all very well to prate of consent, so long as the objects to be accomplished were to liberate ourselves from our connection with England and also to coax a scattered and jealous people into a great national union; but now that those purposes have been accomplished, and the power of the North has become consolidated, it is sufficient for us – as for all governments – simply to say; Our power is our right.
            In proportion to her wealth and population, the North has probably expended more money and blood to maintain her power over an unwilling people, than any other government ever did.  And in her estimation, it is apparently the chief glory of her success, and an adequate compensation for all her own losses, and an ample justification for all her devastation and carnage of the South that all pretence of any necessity for consent to the perpetuity or power of government, is (as she thinks) forever expunged from the minds of the people.  In short, the North exults beyond measure in the proof she has given, that a government, professedly resting on consent, will expend more life and treasure in crushing dissent, that any government, openly founded on force, has ever done.
            And she claims that she has done all this in behalf of liberty

!  In behalf of free government!  In behalf of the principle that government should rest on consent.
            If the successors of Roger Williams, within a hundred years after their State had been founded upon the principle of free religious toleration, and when the Baptists had become strong on the credit that principle, had taken to burning heretics with a fury never seen before among men; and had they finally gloried in having thus suppressed all question of the truth of the State religion; and had they further claimed to have done all in behalf of freedom of conscience, the inconsistency between profession and conduct would scarcely have been greater than that of the North, in carrying on such a war as she has done, to compel men to live under and support a government that they did not want, and in then claiming that she did it in behalf of the principle that government should rest on consent.
            The astonishing absurdity and self-contradiction are to be accounted for only by supposing either that the lusts of fame, and power, and money, have made her utterly blind to, or utterly reckless of, the inconsistency and enormity of her conduct, or that she has never even understood what was implied in a government’s resting on consent.  Perhaps this last explanation is the true one.  In charity to human nature, it is to be hoped that it is. 
Lysander Spooner

^{Wikipedia  2014}

Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 – May 14, 1887) was an American individualist anarchist, political philosopher, Deist, Unitarian abolitionist, supporter of the labor movement, legal theorist, and entrepreneur of the nineteenth century. He is also known for competing with the U.S. Post Office with his American Letter Mail Company, which was forced out of business by the United States government.

Spooner was born on a farm in Athol, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1808, and died "at one o'clock in the afternoon of Saturday, May 14, 1887, in his little room at 109 Myrtle Street, Boston, surrounded by trunks and chests bursting with the books, manuscripts, and pamphlets which he had gathered in his active pamphleteer's warfare over half a century long".^[1]
Spooner advocated what he called Natural Law – or the "Science of Justice" – wherein acts of initiatory coercion against individuals and their property were considered "illegal" but the so-called criminal acts that violated only man-made legislation were not.