It is the prospect of the sovereign individual that seems to most trouble the nation-state today. This odd threat perception has been the outgrowth of a political genealogy that, in the generations since the American Revolution, has increasingly come to equate the state with society while constellating the individual as the enemy of both.

• How can a people self-govern without creating a hereditary class of governors?
• How can sufficient tension, if not conflict, remain between state and society that the rule of law is preserved without becoming a prison?

"That the rights of the individual, not those of the state, are fundamental for a free society.[1] In other words, people have rights; governments do not have rights. Governments have powers, but only those powers that are explicitly delegated to them by the people they represent."

the American state would have no power of its own, no money of its own, and no army of its own. The American Constitution stipulated that all of these things would be effectively on loan from the people, in whom true sovereignty resided.

This money has since come to be widely referred to as “government revenue” rather than “the people’s money.” But the federal government does not confine its spending to the people’s money; rather, it borrows extensively, supporting a ballooning administrative state whose agencies are so numerous and ill-defined that there is no authoritative reference for exactly how many there are.

Government’s gaze into the** economic activity of every person and organization anywhere in the world is effectively unconstrained by any privacy laws or constitutional provisions regarding** search and seizure of assets. This alliance between banking power and policing power took hold during the early twentieth century in what can be called the Banker Revolution—a revolution so successful that few are even aware it happened.