"No Treason:
Spooner and the Constitution of No Authority"
by Joel Bowman
“A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime; whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, or by millions calling themselves a government.”
~ Lysander Spooner, "No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority" (1870)
Syros, Greece - "Long time readers are familiar with our beat here at Notes. But what about the opposite… what about unfree markets… unfree minds… and unfree people? To those inquiring minds who wonder why we only post sunny, cheerful photos and videos of our worldly meanderings, and who question why we only showcase the bright side of Argentina, we have a special treat for you today. Behold, Correo Argentino... and the wretched aesthetic terrorism that is government architecture, where no structure is too grotesque and where form is routinely sacrificed on the altar of dysfunction.
An Affront to Beauty: Correo Argentino, for the blissfully uninitiated, is Argentina’s answer to the question: But is the USPS really as bad as mail delivery gets? Lest you thought it was impossible, Argentina’s version is even uglier and costlier than it’s northern cousin... and more prone to induce visions of “going postal” in those who suffer the misfortune of having to spend more than five minutes of their life inside the bowels of its brutalist structures.
As it so happens, your editor plunged headlong into just such a purgatory right before we left Argentina a few weeks back. That is, we braved the post-apocalyptic scenes, replete with hideous, bomb-shelter design and manned by undead desk clerks, to inquire after a birthday gift that had been mailed by well-intentioned family abroad.
After being abandoned on the wrong side of the proverbial tracks by our taxi driver, we proceeded past the spiked iron fence to a rickety plastic desk, marooned in the middle of an empty parking lot, marked “turnos.” There, a grim gatekeeper demanded to see our identification. “Do you have an appointment,” he barked (in Spanish) between dragonesque draws on his hand-rolled cigarette. The stale smoke mixed with the smell of rotting trash and carbolic acid wafting over from the nearby factories as the sun baked the putrid effluvium into our every reluctant breath.
Naturally, we came prepared with all the relevant paperwork, documents, customs tax receipts, screenshots, QR verification codes and various miscellaneous filings... except, of course, for the right one. A full remark being beyond the clerk’s capacity and/or motivation, he issued forth a contemptuous grunt and pointed a long, tobacco-stained finger towards the line marked “sin turnos,” considerably more serpentine than the other.
The Illusion of Choice: Were it not for the promised delight on our daughter’s face at receiving her grandparent’s gift (and the relief of grandparents abroad upon learning their package had arrived safely), we might have turned heel and absconded for the safety of a café (or bar) in the nearby Recoleta barrio, where private mansions line the cobblestoned streets and lush, belle epoch-style restaurants compete for every centavo of our lunch money.
Full disclosure: In the end, we settled for... both. An hour earning an appetite in line at Correo Argentino (where we were eventually informed the package had “been approved” by the customs authority and would be delivered sometime “in the future”) was followed by a leisurely afternoon enjoying an al fresco luncheon at the wonderful Floreria Atlantico.
The contrast between the market economy on the one side, a throwback to bygone days of plenty here in Argentina... and the scourge of state monopoly on the other, a repugnant reality of the more recent past... could hardly be clearer. And yet, despite the conspicuous differences, stark enough that even an economics PhD might notice them, the case for free markets over central planning still remains the unread, “alternative” theory.
Why should this be the case? Given the choice, who in his right mind would opt for a coercive state monopoly over a voluntary market cornucopia? The TSA over Duty Free? Violence over voluntarism? The IRS over... well, keeping your own money? The answer, of course, is nobody. But that’s the thing about the state... there is no choice, as the tale of Lysander Spooner vs. the USPS illustrates.
Private vs Public: One-hundred and fifty years have passed since American individualist anarchist, staunch neo-abolitionist and proud owner of one of history’s coolest beards, Lysander Spooner, thought to question why the mail was so poorly run. Put simply: It’s the government, stupid!
As now, postal rates were notoriously high during the 1840s, a direct result, inferred Spooner, of the USPS’s monopoly status. Why charge less when there is no competition? Nobody’s going to undercut you…at any price. Similarly, why bother to offer better service? Nobody’s going to siphon off your customers. You’re the only game in town!
In response to the predictably outrageous rates and abysmal service, Spooner set about opening his American Letter Mail Company. He argued that the constitution (which he elsewhere referred to as the Constitution of No Authority, owing to its lack of implicit consent on the part of the governed), granted the state powers to establish mail…but not to exclude others from entering the marketplace too.
“The power given to Congress, is simply ‘to establish post-offices and post roads’ of their own, not to forbid similar establishments by the States or people,” wrote Spooner in his 1844 pamphlet, "The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress," prohibiting Private Mails.
Pressing on the issue of unnatural, coercive monopolies, Spooner continued…"“The idea that the business of carrying letters is, in its nature, a unit, or monopoly, is derived from the practice of arbitrary governments, who have either made the business a monopoly in the hands of the government, or granted it as a monopoly to individuals. There is nothing in the nature of the business itself, any more than in the business of transporting passengers and merchandise, that should make it a monopoly, either in the hands of the government or of individuals.” Spooner’s pamphlet was published the same year his American Letter Mail Company went into business. The company had offices in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, among other cities.
The Statist Quo: Of course, Spooner’s analysis of the market for mail wasn’t restricted solely to ethical grounds. He saw what all astute entrepreneurs see when they decide to go into business…an opportunity to profit, in this case born by the dismal service and high prices commanded by the USPS, then as now. The market - defined as the voluntary individuals acting within it - was crying out for a competitive alternative to the USPS. And Spooner gave it to them, good and hard. His mail company significantly reduced the price of stamps, undercutting the government’s 12-cent standard, and even offered free local delivery on some routes. Hooray for faster, cheaper mail, right?
Needless to say, governments aren’t typically fond of competition. It’s bad for “business,” they say, without the slightest hint of irony. That’s why it maintains and enforces a self-granted monopoly on things like counterfeiting and levying taxes and putting people in cages. (Don’t believe us? Try inking your own dollars... or kidnapping your neighbor because he didn’t hand you a portion of his annual income.)
The case of Spooner vs. the USPS was no different and, after enduring years of fines and state-sponsored assaults on his enterprise, Spooner was finally forced out of business in 1851. But the story of Lysander Spooner and his American Letter Mail Company is not entirely a sad one. Through challenging the “statist-quo,” Spooner’s company proved what many at the time already knew: that the government is no match for private enterprise when it came to offering competitive prices for goods and services through its spontaneous ability to read and respond to the real world demands of the market.
(Interestingly enough, the USPS actually ended up offering a 3-cent stamp in direct response to the challenge from the American Letter Mail Company. Naturally, it was subsidized through government involvement... and was soon retracted after Spooner’s enterprise was out of the way.)
Something of a man before his time, embodying the true and individualist American spirit, Lysander Spooner dared question unnatural authority, rather than simply accepting the limits it forever seeks to impose on us. So the next time someone trots out that weary old trope, “Yes, but who would provide the [insert state-sponsored public disservice here] if not the government?” you can simply answer them, “Individuals would, my good sir…individuals, just like Lysander Spooner."
Freely download "No Treason", by Lysander Spooner, here:
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