Law is solely the organization of the individual right of self-defense which existed before law was formalized.

Every individual has the right to use force for lawful self-defense. It is for this reason that the collective force - which is only the organized combination of the individual forces - may lawfully be used for the same purpose; and it cannot be used legitimately for any other purpose.

It is not true that the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents, or our pleasures. The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights, and to prevent any person from interfering with the free exercise of these same rights by any other persons.

The request of Industry to the government is as modest as that of Diogenes to Alexander: "Stand out of my sunshine."

The budget should be balanced, the treasury refilled, public debt reduced, the arrogance of officialdom tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt.

It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.

C]onflict is kept within bounds when consent remains the fundamental power that binds a polity. No interest can see itself as always being on the losing end in contests with predatory opponents and continue to consent to being a part of the polity. The natural tendency of some to take advantage of their superior power was, in democratic republican theory, halted in the final resort by the citizens’ legitimate right to leave the polity, for if a people’s life, liberty, and happiness became victimized by political means, "it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

DIZERGA, GUS, Persuasion, Power and Polity, A Theory of Democratic Self-Organization, Chapter Two, quoting from the U.S. Declaration of Independence

In a democracy, evidence of systemic failure exists when we find that a polity becomes progressively less able to approach the public good. Policies that are mutually contradictory can but need not be a sign of such failure. Policies that provide politically derived privileges for some at the unwilling expense of others are a sign of such breakdown...When those possessing privileges can then exclude challenges from a political hearing, the problem is made many times worse...Of course, an inability to come to decisions conerning commonly perceived issues is also a sign of systemic failure because the purpose of politics is not only to deliberate, but also to decide what to do...[A] polity making use of self-organizing principles must aim at increasing the prospects that any randomly chosen citizen will be better off, or at least no worse off, as a result of any particular policy and from the entire ensemble of policies as well. In this way the public good is served because such a system would enjoy the unanimous approval of all reasonable citizens.

DIZERGA, GUS, Persuasion, Power and Polity, A Theory of Democratic Self-Organization, Chapter Five

Aristotle held that justice possessed two parts: an abstract element concerned only with the most anonymous general principles that applied to a case, and a particularistic element focusing on individual cases that could never...be completed encompassed by general principles. This particularistic element he termed "equity," and the general element "justice." Artistotle’s distinction finds its parallel in the theory of democracy I am developing. Public compromise polities are ordered by highly abstract rules of justice, and within them the public good is generally concerned with the most general aspects of public policy...In a public persuasion polity the "product" is self-government. Particular policies are simply particular instances of self-government in action...The relationship between public persuasion and public compromise polities is potentially much more mutually beneficial and less contradictory than is usually thought. Public freedom begins where necessity leaves off...The Greek city states were always subject to pressure from the most powerful of necessities: the need to defend themselves against military conquest...Public freedom was much more constrained than usually admitted. Small democracies of this type, existing within the framework of a larger democracy necessarily established along public compromise lines, are freer to develop the possibilities of public persuasion politics. Tocqueville’s description of the cultural effects of New England town democracy in America suggest that they did so. Public persuasion politics is most possible within a framework of public compromise politics, both of which are established as self-organizing systems rather than as instrumental organizations. Thomas Jefferson, with his theory of graduated democratic bodies from the ward to the nation, may well have been the first political theorist to grasp this fact.

DIZERGA, GUS, Persuasion, Power and Polity, A Theory of Democratic Self-Organization, Chapter Five

[T]he frame of government should be such as to secure uniformity in its action so that it shall not act arbitrarily and unequally on its subject.

EMERY, LUCILIUS A., Concerning Justice, Chapter V, Best Form of Government

For the judiciary to be... the protector of the constitutional rights of the individual against the government, ... it should be made so far as possible free, impartial and Independent.

EMERY, LUCILIUS A., Concerning Justice, Chapter VIII, An Independent Judiciary

History shows that those possessing the government power have always been unwilling to maintain an independent judiciary.

EMERY, LUCILIUS A., Concerning Justice, Chapter VIII, An Independent Judiciary

It is true that in most of the states the official tenure of the judges has since been reduced to a more or less brief term of years. This fact is only another instance of the tendency of the governing power to lower if not remove all barriers set up against for the protection of the individual.

EMERY, LUCILIUS A., Concerning Justice, Chapter VIII, An Independent Judiciary

The law...should be the sale to all...and all...are equally eligible to all honours, places, and employments, according to their different abilities, without any other distinction than that created by their virtues and talents.

The law ought to prohibit only actions hurtful to society.

It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve.

The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.

[I]t is to secure our just rights that we resort to government at all.

There are instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nations, and which place them so totally at the mercy of their governors, that those governors, whether legislative or executive, should be restrained from keeping such instruments on foot, but in well-defined cases. Such an instrument is a standing army.

Our legislators are not sufficiently apprised of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us.

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicity.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Among the points which characterise a fair and sound penal trial...we would designate the following:-No, intimidation before the trial, or attempts by artifice to induce the prisoner to confess...; the fullest possible realization of the principle that every man is held innocent until proved to be otherwise, and bail;...a distinct indictment, and the acquaintance of the prisoner with it, sufficiently long before the trial, to give him time for preparing the defense; that no one be held to incriminate himself;...an oral trial, and not a process in writing; counsel or defensors of the prisoner; a distinct theory or law of evidence, and no hearsay testimony; a verdict upon evidence alone...; a punishment proportion to the offence, and...no punitory imprisonment.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter VII

[R]epresentative government has its value...as one of the chief bars against absolutism of the executive on the one, and of the masses on the other hand; as the only contrivance by which it is possible to induce, at the same time, an essentially popular government and the supremacy of the law.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter XV

[L]iberty and steady progression require the principle of the precedent in all spheres. It is one of the roots with which the tree of liberty fastens in the soil of real life, and through which it receives the sap of fresh existence. It is the weapon by which interference is warded off.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter VIII

The history of a people, longing for liberty, but destitute of institutional self-government, will always present a succession of alternating tonic and clonic spasms. Many of the Italian cities in the middle ages furnish us with additional and impressive examples. Liberty is a thing that grows, and institutions are its very garden beds.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter XXVII

If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government that is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed: and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of society; and in the next , to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.

The market directs the individual’s activities into those channels in which he best serves the wants of his fellow men. There is...no compulsion and coercion. The state...employs its power to beat people into submission solely for the prevention of actions destructive to the preservation and the smooth operation of the market economy. It protects the individual’s life, health, and property against violent or fraudulent aggression on the part of domestic gangsters and external flows.

[A] minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, [and] fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; [and] that any more extensive state will violate persons’ rights not to be forced to do certain things.

Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.

The United States is a constitutional republic, not a regime intended to embody "the will of the people..." Indeed, the idea of the will of the people is a deeply authoritarian idea completely at odds with the idea of government under law...As political historian J. L. Talmon noted..."The very idea of an assumed preordained will, which has not yet become the actual will of the nation...gives those who claim to know and to represent the real and ultimate will of the nation - the party of the vanguard - a blank cheque to act on behalf of the people, without reference to the people’s actual will."

SAMPLES, JOHN; PALMER, TOM G;, BASHAM, PATRICK, Lessons of Election 2000, CATO Institute Briefing Papers No. 59, January 2, 2000

Little else is requisite to carry a State to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavor to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.

According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to: three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense.

Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished, and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least."