A Toast to Lysander Spooner

Tags: Biographies

01/19/2010 Jeff Riggenbach

Spooner was an American individualist anarchist with radical opinions on everything. His true calling was writing pamphlets and books on issues of the day. His private postal service was forced out of business by the government. He again lost everything and lived out his years as an urban recluse. His most famous work was The Unconstitutionality of Slavery. No Treason is his most famous political tract (1867). “Although Spooner’s argument on the unconstitutionality of slavery had no legal basis, his concept of natural law contained the germs of anarchistic theory of government”.

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.