Today’s nation-state is primarily concerned about the possibility of the independent individual. This peculiar apprehension has grown out of a political lineage which, since the American Revolution, has increasingly associated the state with society, while depicting the individual as an adversary. This concept would have deeply disturbed the founders of the American republic, who initiated a new national project to prevent the abuses of a well-established and predatory aristocracy. Their primary question was: How can a society self-govern without creating a hereditary class of rulers?
The American founders came up with an innovative solution rooted in a revolutionary principle: individual rights, not state rights, are the foundation of a free society. Put simply, people have rights, governments do not. Governments have powers, but only those explicitly granted by the people they represent. Any actions taken by state agents beyond their enumerated powers are an infringement of the people’s rights. The people are responsible for maintaining these explicit limits and can reclaim the enumerated powers of the state at any time.
The founders turned the dominant political assumptions of their time on their head. It was the state that had to demonstrate its worthiness, not the people who had to prove their innocence or their lack of obligations to the state. This fundamentally meant that the American state would have no power, money, or army of its own. Everything would essentially be loaned from the people, in whom true sovereignty resided.
However, things have drastically changed since the Constitution was ratified. The US now seems to have its own army, engaged in nearly endless warfare, and its own money. The government no longer spends only the people’s money, it borrows extensively. The number of federal agencies is such that it’s hard to determine the exact count. These agencies act as both rule-making and rule-enforcing entities, eliminating the checks and balances put in place by the Constitution. This gives the illusion that the government has its own power.
What underpins all of these visible manifestations of state power is the less visible financial system, where central banks issue and manage the supply and price of non-redeemable fiat currencies. This alliance between banking power and policing power became established during the early twentieth century in what can be termed the Banker Revolution.
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Endnotes:
[1] Source: Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence.
[2] Source: Clyde Wayne Crews, “How Many Federal Agencies Exist?” Forbes, July 5, 2017.
[3] Source: Molly Fischer, “What Is a Federal Agency?” Federal Agency Directory, Louisiana State University Libraries, March 28, 2011.
