“We believe that the age of individual economic sovereignty is coming…
The Sovereign Individual of the new millennium will no longer be an asset of the state, a de facto item on the treasury’s balance sheet.”
– The Sovereign Individual, written by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg
Written by Bryan Lutz, Editor at Dollarcollapse.com:
A quiet revolution is happening.
Not because of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies or blockchain technology necessarily, but in the hyper-democratization of exchange.
There are more ways to exchange value at a greater scale than ever before.
But let’s start with some history…
The industrializing agrarian culture of the 19th Century naturally developed more ways to exchange value.
For the most part, even in the city, people made their living using the work of their hands. They relied on exchanging the use of practical skills to make their living.
And their food, likewise mostly came from local farms.
In his book, ‘Self-Reliance‘ in the 21st Century, Charles Hugh Smith writes:
“Households met many of their needs themselves, but they relied on trusted personal networks of makers and suppliers for whatever goods and services they could not provide themselves.
Households sold their surplus production of homemade goods and family businesses offered at a small-scale production of specialty goods(metal foraging, furniture, etc.) and services (printing, legal documents, etc.)”
We see this in contrast to today, where almost every inhabited part of the world has access to the internet people can form latent personal networks.
Personal networks can now be established across borders, across continents, and beyond the demands of the local currency.
There are two economic factors at work here:
- We can choose where we live, and who to work with beyond State boundaries.
- We can choose how we are paid, how we buy, and how we sell.
For example, a person can choose…
To live out his days on a small, family farm raising children in the quiet of the Wyoming country-side…
Or travelling the world while home schooling their children for much of the year…
Or buying property in several parts of the world all while establishing personal networks for self-reliance locally, and around the world.
That isn’t something we could ever do before.
And when it comes to exchange of goods and services…
Gold remains the most universal means of exchange.
Before the establishment of a Federal currency in the United States, and even after, a person could buy and sell and in gold coins.
It didn’t matter whose face was on the coin, all that mattered to the government was that you “render to Caesar that which was Caesar’s” because the State had the ability to capture and even claim economic ownership…
First, by a federal currency, and then by the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve (and possibly CBDCs) are the eventual totalizing effort of the State to defend its economic claims on individuals.
Now, with more ways to exchange value internationally, the currencies of the State are becoming less important.
Services the State provides are also becoming less important.
In education, for example, if I want to home-school my children, all that is needed is a mere investment of less than $1500 per year in privatized software covering all the subjects of science, math, reading, writing, and more (something I am already taking advantage of in place of a paid tutor).
You choose how you pay for education, medicine, and pet employment insurance (CAD, USD, Bitcoin, ETH, or tokenized gold-backed coins).
And it even changes how you pay others in your local neighborhood for the goods they produce, the items they supply, and services they render…
All because a quiet revolution is rapidly expanding and prioritizing the economic choices of the individual.
