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Not that I am empowered to make this accommodation with you, but is that a yes or a no?

That's not a yes, that's a hell yes!

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Keep in mind that, even with this accommodation, you are not free to pursue your own forms of "justice."

Oh no you don't. If I opt out of being coerced by your government, then I opt out of being coerced by your government. Your government no longer gets to say what I can and can't do, period--unless I say different, or unless I initiate force against it.

To which end, of course, we could draw up a contract between your government and me, if you liked, defining the ways in which I would agree to respect your government's laws as they applied to other people, and your government would agree to leave me the heck alone. It would also, of course, outline the ways in which your government would be authorized to enforce the contract on me if I broke it, and what means of justice I would be limited to when dealing with your government after it broke the contract.

In real life, of course, this contract would be the sticking point. Your government would have no motivation to give favorable terms of any sort--or even to offer such an accommodation at all. It would be motivated simply to shut down all the companies listed on the "alternative" banknotes, preferably by great show of overwhelming force--even if they were on foreign soil--and to confiscate any "alternative" money it ran across, in order to demonstrate the grave result of defying its authority. That'd be pretty easy for even a Constitutional government run by "authentic American conservatives" to justify, given that the Constitution reserves to Congress the power to coin money.

Unless we were in the middle of an Unintended Consequences-like situation, of course, where government officials were waking up dead at the rate of one or two a day and the government had to deal rather than simply applying force.


"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain--that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." --Lysander Spooner, 1867