Lysander Spooner

Lysander Spooner was an American individualist anarchist, political philosopher, Deist, 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." 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. His activism began with his career as a lawyer, which itself violated Massachusetts law.
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