Treasury Secretary Jack Lew says if Congress doesn’t raise
the debt ceiling—or, as I call it, the debt sky, because apparently
the sky is the
limit—the government won’t be able to pay all its bills
starting October 17. The Congressional Budget Office says that dire
condition won’t set in until sometime between October 22 and
31.

As he has each time this issue has come up, President Obama
emphasizes that increasing the debt would only permit the
government to pay expenses already incurred and
would not finance new spending. To which I again reply,
rhetorically: Why is Congress allowed to spend money that it knows
it won’t possess unless the debt limit is
raised? Not only does that violate good sense, it also rigs the
debate over the debt limit by threatening default as the price of
voting no.

Such a query about the debt sky assumes that Congress operates
in a context of legitimacy. So what we really need to do is step
back and question that context itself. To do that, there is no
better person to turn to than Lysander
Spooner (1808–1887), lawyer, abolitionist, entrepreneur,
and libertarian subversive. It so happens that in section XVII of
his 1870 essay “The
Constitution of No Authority” (number 6 in his No
Treason series), Spooner took up the question of
government debt with his signature fresh look. As you might
imagine, he left nothing standing.

“On general principles of law and reason,” Spooner wrote, “debts
contracted in the name of ‘the United States,’ or of ‘the people of
the United States,’ are of no validity.”

How could that be?

It is utterly absurd to pretend that debts to the amount of
twenty-five hundred millions of dollars are binding upon
thirty-five or forty millions of people, when there is not a
particle of legitimate evidence — such as would be required to
prove a private debt — that can be produced against any one of
them, that either he, or his properly authorized attorney, ever
contracted to pay one cent.

Certainly, neither the whole people of the United States, nor
any number of them, ever separately or individually contracted to
pay a cent of these debts.

He has a point. I can’t recall ever registering such consent—or
being asked to, for that matter. Can you? Aren’t we taught that the
“consent of the governed” is a sacred American principle?

Earlier in the essay, Spooner handily disposes of the claim that
voting or paying taxes implies consent. Since we are subjected to
the government’s impositions whether or not we vote—opting out is
forbidden—any given individual may have cast a vote purely in
self-defense, for the perceived lesser of two evils. And paying
taxes certainly cannot signify consent, because the penalty for
nonpayment is theft of one’s property, imprisonment, or (should one
resist) death. In fact, there is no way not to
consent, which makes the whole question rather suspicious. How can
one actually consent if there is no possible way to withhold
consent? (Charles W.
Johnson has something to say about that.)

So by what authority do the people who claim to constitute the
U.S. government borrow money in our names and compel us to repay
the debt? By no authority at all, as far as I can see, unless
“might makes right” counts as authority.

Spooner continues,

How, then, is it possible, on any general principle of law or
reason, that debts that are binding upon nobody individually, can
be binding upon forty millions of people collectively, when, on
general and legitimate principles of law and reason, these forty
millions of people neither have, nor ever had, any corporate
property? never made any corporate or individual contract? and
neither have, nor ever had, any corporate existence?

It seems that this is not possible. “Who, then, created these
debts, in the name of ‘the United States’?” he asks.

Why, at most, only a few persons, calling themselves “members
of Congress,” etc., who pretended to represent “the people of
the United States,” but who really represented only a secret
band of robbers and murderers, who wanted money to carry on
the robberies and murders in which they were then engaged; and
who intended to extort from the future people of the United
States, by robbery and threats of murder (and real murder, if
that should prove necessary), the means to pay these debts.

Here, when Spooner says the members of Congress only “pretended
to represent” Americans at large, he is referring to his earlier
point that because the ballot is secret, we really don’t know whom
these alleged representatives actually represent, that is, whose
agents they really are.