It seems that it is the perspective of the sovereign individual that troubles the nation-state today. This bizarre perception of threat was the product of a political strain that, in the generations following the American Revolution, increasingly equated the state with society while portraying the individual as an enemy of both. This equation would have been extremely confusing to the founders of the American republic, who called for a new national project precisely to prevent the abuses of an entrenched and predatory upper class—the aristocracy—that viewed itself as the rightful guardian, in perpetuity, of the destiny and best interests of the people. Thus, the political question that moved America’s founders was: How can a people govern itself without creating a hereditary class of rulers? How can enough tensionIf not conflictIs it possible for the state and society to maintain the rule of law without turning it into a prison?
The Founders devised an ingenious solution to this problem based on a revolutionary premise: that the rights of the individual, not the rights of the state, are essential to a free society. (1) In other words, people have rights; Governments have no rights. Governments have powers, however only Those powers which are expressly delegated to them by the people they represent. More precisely, the people enjoy all the rights mentioned and unmentioned, while the state only has those powers that are explicitly mentioned. Any actions carried out by state employees outside the scope of their aforementioned powers are considered a usurpation of the rights of the people. These express boundaries must be protected by the people, and they can restore the powers of the said state at any time.
In other words, the American Founders overturned the prevailing political assumptions of their cultural world: people did not have to prove that they deserved rights, were innocent before the law, or had absolved themselves of inherited obligations. To the state. Rather, it was the state that bore the burden of proof: that it deserved trust; that it has the ability to take a particular action; that any person or entity was guilty under the law; Or that its military powers must be exercised with the blood and treasure of the people. Concretely, this meant that during the era of the American Constitutional Convention, when debate raged between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, a formative consensus emerged that the American state would have no power of its own, no money of its own, and no army of its own. The US Constitution stipulates that all of these things will effectively be on loan from the people in whom true sovereignty lies.
But things have changed profoundly since the ratification of the Constitution. Not only did America quickly create a standing army after that; This army has been engaged in almost continuous wars – more than a hundred foreign and domestic conflicts, declared and undeclared – since that time. While most Americans today are likely familiar with the large-scale conflicts in which their nation has been involved—the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the two World Wars, for example—they would likely be surprised by the majority of the wars in which it has been involved. The United States participated. During the nineteenth century, these wars were fought mostly against American Indian tribes as part of the campaign to colonize the West, while those wars were mostly fought against socialist and communist movements around the world. In contrast, the conflicts of the twenty-first century have been tried under the slogan of the war on terrorism, and more recently under the slogan of containing hostile states. Although the Constitution gives Congress the sole authority to declare war, in practice, Congress has only declared war in a few major conflicts: the War of 1812, the wars against Mexico and Spain, and the wars against specific belligerents in World Wars I and II. The rest were launched through some form of unilateral executive action, whether by presidential decree or by decision of military officers.
Just as the United States government now appears to have its own army, it appears to have its own money. In 1913, Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment, giving it the right to impose permanent income taxes on the American people; Estate taxes, gift taxes, capital gains taxes, and corporate taxes followed shortly thereafter, while other permanent forms of taxation were introduced in the decades that followed. This money has since been widely referred to as “government revenue” rather than “people’s money.” But the federal government does not limit its spending to the people’s money; Rather, it borrows on a large scale and supports a bloated administrative state with agencies so numerous and ill-defined that there is no reliable reference to determine the exact number of its agencies. Federal Register, Online Federal Register, US Government Guidethe A reference book for United States executive agenciesthe Consolidated Agenda for Federal Regulatory and Deregulation, FOIA.gov, and USA.gov all list very different numbers and definitions for agencies.(2),(3) These agencies act as rule-making and rule-enforcement bodies, collapsing everything Three branches of government (legislative, executive and judicial) in one branch in their own operations. This eliminates the checks and balances that the Framers put in place to constrain state power, subjecting the American people to an ever-increasing body of laws that they had no role in making and that they have no electoral power to change or repeal. . As a result, the illusion is created that the government has its own authority.
But while military conflict, taxation, and bureaucratic rule are all visible manifestations of state power, they rest on a platform that seems so natural and so ubiquitous today that it goes largely unnoticed: the financial system in which central banks issue and manage supply. And the price of non-redeemable paper currencies. These currencies act as base money which commercial banks in turn use as reserve assets to make loans. Commercial banks and central banks around the world form a network of financial intermediaries who share with each other information about every transaction that passes through their networks – which is also shared with military, intelligence and police agencies of governments and intergovernmental organizations around the world. The government’s view of the economic activity of every person and organization anywhere in the world is virtually unconstrained by any privacy laws or constitutional provisions regarding asset searches and seizures. This alliance between banking and police power took hold in the early twentieth century in what might be called the bankers’ revolution – a revolution so successful that few people realize it is happening.
The Satoshi Papers, a project created by the Texas Bitcoin Foundation and edited by Natalie Smolensky, will be available for pre-order on November 19 in paperback and limited edition from the bookstore.
(1) Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence states: “We hold these truths sacred and undeniable; That all men are created equal & Independent (emphasis added), that from that equal creation they derive inherent and inalienable rights, that among these are the preservation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. See Thomas Jefferson, “Image 1 of Thomas Jefferson, June 1776, Initial Draft of the Declaration of Independence,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.001_0545_0548/?sp=1.
(2) Clyde Wayne Cruz, “How Many Federal Agencies Are There?” ForbesJuly 5, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynecrews/2017/07/05/how-many-federal-agency-exist-we-cant-drain-the-swamp-until-we-know /?sh=535830391aa2.
(3) Molly Fisher, “What is a Federal Agency?” Federal Agency Handbook, Louisiana State University Libraries, March 28, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20130518150541/http://www.lib.lsu.edu/gov/fedagencydef.pdf.