What Does It Mean To Be Sovereign?
The term Sovereign Individual comes from the book of the same name (“The Sovereign Individual”) by James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg – a path-breaking work that looked at history and predicted various fundamental changes to the way the world works, due to a decline in the influence of external authority.
At its root, being “sovereign” means being your own ruler, your own authority, your own “king”. It means being the sole owner of your own life.
This is a radical idea – one which, once you think about it deeply, challenges every external authority on the planet.
An external authority is one which claims to have authority over you – either a person, an organisation or a government.
To be a Sovereign Individual means you assert your right to your own life, to be able to control your own life. This has important ramifications. If your life is your own and your body is your own property, then the manifestation of your thinking and personal effort must also belong to you. This is what is meant by the term “property”.
If you work hard (expenditure of your own energy) and save money (an expression of your energy), and purchase a house – then that house is your property because it was acquired by the direct application of your mind and effort. In this way, your house becomes an extension of you – your property.
To be a Sovereign Individual means to have 100% control over your own life and property. And let me assure you, that is a most radical and subversive idea, as the whole world is geared to the opposite idea – that you are subservient to any number of external authorities.
The most obvious external authority is the state – that entity that arbitrarily asserts its right to control every aspect of your life. It taxes you (steals your property), legislates against you by controlling what you can or cannot put into or do with your own body (anti-smoking, anti-drug, anti-gambling), and even wants to control what you eat! The state takes upon itself the right to monitor and control every aspect of your life.
What makes the state’s control so pernicious is that it is enforced at gunpoint. Sure, there are other forms of external authority – overbearing parents, in-your-face religion etc., but only one of these external authorities deem it legitimate to force such control on you.
If you accept the idea that you are indeed a self-owner – then I can assure you, you are in deep trouble already. It means you will agree that you and only you have the right to determine the manner and timing of your own death – should you decide to terminate it early (as in euthanasia).
It means that every dollar extracted from you via tax is an attack on your property – and 100% immoral. It means you will be at “war” with the democratic state – which seeks to transfer incomes (via tax) from those who have “too much”, to those who have “too little” – the definition of each group being entirely at the discretion of the state. And if you happen to disagree, then any direct disobedience will quickly convince you as to who is the real ruler of your life.
The freedom we think we have is largely a fantasy – a construct of our state-controlled education at the hands of our rulers (the state). If you really try to assert your freedom and the right to your property, you will soon be reminded as to who actually pulls the strings.
Given this horrendous institutional opposition to freedom – not just by the state, but by most other citizens – what is a genuine freedom seeker to do? There is only one course of action. You cannot fight the state on its own terms. You have to find ways to subvert it, to avoid it, to disappear from view. This is the challenge – to remove yourself from in front of the proverbial tank, and set your own course in life.
Forget voting. Forget democracy. These are devices to trick you into thinking you have some say over your own life. If you take part in that game, you are admitting that your freedom is tied up in the idea of majority rule – a stupid and evil idea by any measure. No. To be truly free you must embark on a lonely journey – devoid of voting and political side-taking. You can’t afford to waste a precious moment of your life in trying to “change” the system.
Change begins with you. If you want to be freer, then you will need to take direct action to make it happen – yourself.
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Absolutely right. A blog like this is needed and in fact overdue. I finished reading the book you refer to a couple of days ago and it certainly makes a compelling argument.
All the best and welcome to the blogosphere!
Excellent idea this blog.
You are correct Dave. It is a holey subversive treasonous idea and attitude. Boy I can’t wait to be sovereign!!! I personally am really sick and tired of other people (the government) sticking their fingers into my business.
At one time the USA was the bastion of hope and freedom for the world. However that started to really change a little more than 100yrs ago with the first “progressive” movement. It has only gotten worse since then. Both of the political parties are dragging us to totalitarianism. What really sucks is that the government is really the treasonous entity here. They are the ones that have thrown out the constitution and try to convince us that they too have a “living” constitution with which to subject us. Right now it is Obama that is literally breaking laws and violating our constitutional rights all in the name of security (hope and change). All with the support of many Americans that want a nanny state. What they do not seem to grasp is that to have security you give up freedom. I would much rather have FREEDOM!!! Obama should be arrested along with the whole government and tried for treason. Unfortunately the citizens of the USA have become a herd of sheep, and not the good kind of sheep either. This entire country and the world are being enslaved for generations by his and the government’s reckless spending. One of the most serious things here is that the people in the general public that support this government security blanket that they want to control how you live because they do not agree with it but have no concept how this is going to come back and bite them!!!!!!!!!
With the way things are now and also in combination with the direction they are headed the only coarse is to leave the country and tell the government where they can stick their totalitarianism. Screw Obama, screw the government and screw any person that does not truly understand what is happening now and wants to subject us to their will.
Taxes. Pay your taxes?? Just send a reply stating- These are NOT MY TAXES THEY ARE YOURS!! I neither want them nor voted for them. The are ENFORCED upon me and supress my civil liberties. Taxed fund Beaurocrats and little else. Look at the state of the UK Politicians and US appologies of such. A sleazy, duplicitious, vaccuous and nasty breed. Taxes to fund this lot? Read up on Worldreports.org.com. US and UK realities and horror stories.
I agree with what you say and I am, at some level, sympathetic to your approach. I am an admirer of Ayn Rand and certainly it appears her ideas have informed your opinion. Two points:
(1) I am a physician and would find it very difficult to take my family and live elsewhere to legally avoid taxes and potentially live more freely. The idea is appealing but not very do-able for me. In addition, even if it were do-able, I think there is a lifestyle issue that you may not be facing up to fully. When you are always on the move (or always potentially on the move) then you lose that sense of stability that comes form a home, family relations, etc.. I would imagine that I would need to continually be checking the ‘rules’ with regard to which country I can work in, send my child to school in, etc.. World or local upheavals will affect me just the same. I may be able to avoid a large and obvious upcoming type of event, but I trade that against the constantly changing rules and issues associated with living in or dealing with multiple countries. You really need, I guess I am saying, to keep your ear to the ground and constantly ‘keep up’ with all these issues. This is the hidden ‘tax’ of the type of life you put forth. I still LIKE the idea, but am just pointing out some potential problems from my perspective that some of your other potential customers might also be struggling with.
(2) While I like the idea of ruling my own life, I don’t totally write off interacting with and improving society. I agree, voting is really an over-rated activity – almost designed to get people to believe they have some measure of control. But other activities might be both enjoyable and beneficial to certain individuals – such as being a congressman, writing op-ed pieces for the local newspaper, or organizing communities for/against some particularly egregious government action. You might want to note that such people are fighting the good fight, even though they may not win.
Overall, I think you have to acknowledge and put forth your ideal of a proper society. This would bolster your position, I think. You would say, “there really is no where in the world that is close to this proper ideal, and therefore, I am creating it piecemeal from various other countries. I know that it is more difficult to live this sort of life, but then again, I prefer it to the tyranny of any one country.”
Indeed, if there were enough like-minded folks such as yourself, you might even want to buy/create a country of your own at some point (perhaps an island at least) – this to me, would be a tremendous achievement. I’d probably want to live there!
From one “David” to an other …
Yes, I realise the lifestyle option is not easy for everyone. However, I should point out that one is not living “out of a suitcase”. One can have two main homes and have them both set up permanently – in two different countries. That only leaves about a month each year in which to go somewhere else for a holiday.
The essential concept of a PT lifestyle is as you say – to shop around for countries where you can “mix and match” to get what you need for a happy and fulfilling life.
As to buying or creating a country – that has been a dream of many, a dream that has so far failed. Certainly one can buy an island – but one cannot purchase sovereignty over that island.
There is the “free state” project in the USA, based on the idea of getting people of like mind to move to the same area, and therefore take over the reigns of local state power (not federal power though). I don’t really find this idea compelling enough.
Yes, I know there are many things people can do apart from voting – and spreading freedom ideas is one such worthwhile action. But this needs to be done on a personal level, dealing with individuals – not political parties. One of the reasons I constantly reinforce the concept of “self ownership” and the need to have 100% control over one’s own life and property, is that when this is understood fully, it provides the answer to everything.
Society needs to be changed from the ground up – one individual at a time – not from the top down (politics). In fact the political situation in any country is really a reflection of the the people themselves (in a democracy), which gives rise to the sentiment that people get the government they deserve.
Libertarian-inclined individuals are always in the minority, and cannot hope to win any kind of election as long as the masses are of a different persuasion.
I love this destination you refer to called “Freedom” I’ve given it lot’s of thought myself. But what will I do there when we arrive? Who else will be there and what will we do?
I like this intrepretation for the here and now and it is something we can all adapt to and practice beyond the valuable applications you suggest.
Here it is:
Ludwig von Mises didn’t like references to the “miracle” of the marketplace or the “magic” of production or other terms that suggest that economic systems depend on some force that is beyond human comprehension. In his view, we are better off coming to a rational understanding of why markets are responsible for astounding levels of productivity that can support exponential increases in population and ever higher living standards.
There was no German miracle after World War II, he used to say; the glorious recovery was a result of economic logic working itself out through market forces. Once we understand the relationship between property rights, market prices, the time structure of production, and the division of labor, the mystery evaporates and we observe the science of human action making great things happen.
He is right that understanding economics does not require faith, but there are actions undertaken by market actors themselves that require faith (and Mises would not disagree with this) – immense faith, faith that moves mountains and raises up civilizations. If we accept the interesting description of faith by St. Paul (“evidence of things unseen”) we can understand entrepreneurship and capitalist investment as acts of faith.
Everyone who is in business understands this. It requires a thousand daily acts of seeing the unseen future to be in business. The reality of the marketplace is that the consuming public can shut you down tomorrow. All they need to do is to fail to show up and buy.
This is true for the smallest business to the largest. There is no certainty in any business. Nothing is a sure thing. Every business in a market economy is only a short step from bankruptcy. No business possesses the power to make people buy what they do not want. All success is potentially fleeting.
Success does yield a profit, but that provides no comfort. Every bit of profit you take for yourself comes out of what might otherwise be an investment in the development of the business. But neither is this investment a sure thing. Today’s smash hit could be tomorrow’s flop. What you perceive to be a solid investment could turn out to be a short-term craze. What you see, based on past sales, as having a potential mass appeal could actually be a market segment that was quickly saturated.
Emperors can rest on their laurels but capitalists never can.
Sales history provides nothing but a look backwards. The future is never seen with clarity but only through a glass, darkly. Past performance is not only not a guarantee of future success; it is no more or less than a data set of history that can tell us nothing about the future. If the future turns out to look like the past, the probabilities still do not change, any more than the probability of the next coin toss landing on heads increases because it happened previously five times in a row.
Despite the utter absence of a road map, the entrepreneur-investor must act as if some future is mapped out. He or she must still hire employees and pay them long before the products of their labor come to market, and even longer before those marketable products are sold and turn a profit. The equipment must be purchased, upgraded, serviced, and replaced, which means that the entrepreneur must think about today’s costs and tomorrow’s and the next day’s saecula saeculorum.
Especially now, the costs can be mind-boggling. A retailer must consider an amazing array of options concerning suppliers and web services. There must be some means of alerting the world to your existence, and despite a century of attempts to employ scientific methods for finding out what makes the consumer tick, advertising remains high art, not positive science. But it is also art with high expense. Are you throwing money down a rathole or really getting the message out? There is no way to know in advance.
The heck of it too is that there are no testable causes of success because there is no way to perfectly control for all important factors. Sometimes not even the most successful business is clued into what it is, precisely, what makes its products sell more as compared with its competitors. Is it price, quality, status, geography, promotion, psychological associations people make with the product, or what?
Back into the 1980s, for example, Coca Cola decided to change its formula and advertise it as New Coke. The result was a catastrophe as consumers fled, even though the taste tests said that people liked the new better than the old.
If the historical data are so difficult to interpret, think how much more difficult it is to discern probable outcomes in the future. You can hire accountants, marketing agencies, financial wizards, and designers. They are technicians, but there are no such things as reliable experts in overcoming uncertainty. An analogy might be a man in a pitch-black room who hires people to help him put one foot in front of the other. His steps can be steady and sure but neither he nor his helpers can know for sure what is in front of him.
“What distinguishes the successful entrepreneur and promoter from other people,” writes Mises, “is precisely the fact that he does not let himself be guided by what was and is, but arranges his affairs on the ground of his opinion about the future. He sees the past and the present as other people do; but he judges the future in a different way.”
It is for this reason that entrepreneurial habit of mind cannot be implanted through training or education. It is something possessed and cultivated by an individual. There are no entrepreneurial committees, much less entrepreneurial planning boards.
The inability of governments to engage in the entrepreneurial act of faith is one of many reasons why socialism cannot work. Even if a bureaucrat can look at history and claim that his agency could have made a car, dry wall, or a microchip, that same person is at a loss to figure out how innovations in the future can take place. His only guide is technology: he can speculate about what might work better than what is presently available. But that is not the economic issue: the real issue concerns what is the best means given all the alternative uses of resources to satisfy the most urgent wants of consumers in light of an infinity of possible wants.
This is impossible for governments to do.
There are thousands of reasons why entrepreneurship should never take place but only one good one for why it does: these individuals have superior speculative judgment and are willing to take the leap of faith that is required to test their speculation against the facts of an uncertain future. And yet it is this leap of faith that drives forward our standards of living and improves life for millions and billions of people. We are surrounded by faith. Growing economies are infused with it.
Mises forgive me: this is a miracle.
This article was written by Lew Rockwell.
To Greater Success! (And Freedom!)
Darell B. Provost
Hi! I like your srticle and I would like very much to read some more information on this issue. Will you post some more?
Correct. As stated in the first paragraph
Hi Konstantin,
I trust your last comment was a response to my posting.
I recommend you check out Lew Rockwell. Com or The Daily Reckoning and anything by Douglas Casey.
Simply Google them and sign up as they are free newsletters.
I’m sure you’ll like the mind set you’ll find there.
Take Care!
Darell B. Provost
http://www.InternetMoneyDaily.co.cc