“Government is not only a protection service; it is also a protection racket. While government provides protection against violence originating with others, like the protection racket it also charges customers for protection against harm that it would otherwise impose itself. The first action is an economic service. The second is a racket.
In practice, the distinction between the two forms of “protection” may be difficult to make. Governments, as Charles Tilly has pointed out, may perhaps be best understood as “our largest examples of organized crime.” ~ The Sovereign Individual
Often referred to as the “Bitcoin Old Testament”, The Sovereign Individual is one of those books one has to read if one wants to know what other people are talking about.
My tiny anarchist soul loves the way the authors rail against the inefficiencies, ineptitudes and iniquities of government.
My freedom-loving spirit was happy to be carried away on the pictures they painted about how to live in luxury as a sovereign individual.
My logical mind was tantalised by the groundwork they laid for what would become the independent, incentive driven crypto community breaking the system and punishing The Man today.
However. My cynical inner self still couldn’t help noticing that even the proponents of the sovereign individual lifestyle admitted in passing that in all likelihood only the richest 100 million odd people would ever accumulate enough private wealth a power to be sovereign individuals…
What if the sovereign individual lifestyle dream is just another way of selling the self-same World Economic Forum vision of a global socialist utopia to a more “right wing” or libertarian orientated mass market? That world where “YOU will own nothing and YOU will be happy“, a vision that begs the question who, then, will own everything?
The answer to which may very well be those self-same “sovereign individuals”…
After all, what happens to the unlucky majority of un-sovereign individuals?
Hmm.
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