Personal Sovereignty

Personal sovereignty? "What the heck is that?" you ask. "Some sort of narcissistic royalty complex or something?" No, not at all. First, though, in the never ending quest for clarity, let's examine the term "sovereignty."

Sov-er-eign-ty, noun. The condition or state of a sovereign; the possession of supreme power.
Root word: sovereign, noun. [Middle English soveraine, sovereyn, from Old French soverain; French souverain; Italian sovrano, soprano; from L.Latin supranus, from Latin super, meaning over, above.]
1. One who excercises supreme power; a supreme ruler; the person having the highest authority in a state, as a king or emperor, et cetera; a monarch.

Now, with that in mind, consider the following postulates:

First, the application of sovereignty to yourself personally. You may or may not have considered it, what with all of the other persons or entities asserting some authority or control over you and your life - your employer, the Internal Revenue Service, the various layers of government, even your own family - but, contrary to popular practice, you are the true and only source of what you do in life, and hence, what results from that. If you choose to disregard the wants or demands of others, a different result will occur to your and their situations. And, if it weren't for your cooperation, others would not necessarily end up satisfied. They may not be concerned with your reasoning at first, but, whatever it is, because it's your own self determinination, it dictates the outcome without question.

For instance, say you have to complete a proposal on a deadline that would net your company a huge sale and you a handsome commission of five figures, and, you owe taxes that could cause you to loose your house if it doesn't fly. But...... you have a coronary artery blockage, and a haphazzard tour in a one-ton truck with a box and bright flashing lights on back sounds infinitely more compelling than any of the other problems at hand. It's your decision to either dilligently persevere with the paperwork, and, let your heirs divide your estate, or, preserve your carcass to fight for another sale on top of the ground later. No one else gets that call. In the end, you're the supreme authority over you. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks or wants. Any possible situation you can come up with involves your consent, although the alternatives may not necessarily lead to optimal conclusions. The people in the top floors of the Twin Towers individually chose to either stay in the buildings or jump. We won't go through all of the rest of the possibilities here.

The point I'm trying to make is that if you conceed your authority, or, sovereignty, over yourself either temporarily, or, permanently, to someone else, except as in incapacitation, even that decision was originally up to you, thereby exercizing that original sovereignty.

Second, the Founding Fathers realized that a human being's drive to thrive depended upon the ability to take full advantage of the possibilities presented by allowing personal sovereignty the freedom it needed to be fully excercized. They understood that, logically speaking, personal sovereignty was a natural state independent of control by others, not subject to it. In other words, you have supreme authority over your self, life, and, the effort and fruits of your labor. That assumption is a basic underlying principle behind our civil rights. They don't come from your boss at work, or, other citizens, or the United States Senate. They are God given, or natural, rights. You were born with them, they are yours to practice freely, the only restriction being adverse affects on the person of others - that obviously being reciprocal.

To the end of preserving those rights, the Founders conferred government sovereignty, or, the posession of supreme power over the country, upon you and me. This is OUR country. OUR government. These are OUR lives. Not the President's, not the Speaker of the House's, not Senate Majority Leader's, the Socialists', the Statists' or, any one of the alphabet regulatory agencies'. Under the Constitution, politicians do not assume the people's sovereignty while governing, as they are only stewards of the government. (I realize that some of them aren't clear on that.) To ensure sovereignty was not usurped, the Founders made government very easy to control; with nothing more than votes.

They realized that sovereignty was both so important to the people, and, at the same time, so dangerous when concentrated in one or a few persons, that they had to divide it up equally, along with the ensuing responsibility to protect it, amongst the citizens. That's why elected officials serve at our pleasure, and are, unlike royalty, stripped of their power after being turned out of office.

But, like freedom, sovereignty can be lost. Every time you vote for a Statist or the like, and allow them to continue eroding your soveriegnty by confiscating your earnings and creating endless regulation, every time you let them get away with consolidating your lost power within themselves, every time you let them pull the wool over your eyes by not educating yourself on how to sort out the truth, you risk the clear danger of blowing away your control over your own life, of loosing your sovereignty.

And, make no mistake, your sovereignty is so valueable that there will always be con men and women trying dilligently to wrest it away from you. The effort runs the gamut, from identity theft to government taking your money and using it to control your decisions. Seriously, do you trust people who thought nothing of lying to get their jobs to run your own affairs? Allowing Congress to pass Healthcare Reform in it's present form is nothing to do with improving access to medicine. Just read the bill. It's abdication of your personal sovereignty. It's surrender of your share of absolute power over your life and destiny, and, the Country. Worse, it's subjugation of your children without their knowledge. Does that really mean less than partying with "the boys" on Saturday night or catching the final episode of "24" on Fox?

China's Tienemen Square revolt collapsed not because of a few Chinese Army tanks, but, because a billion Chinese didn't excercise their natural right of personal sovereignty and turn on the government, and, with those numbers, it could have been a rout. The Chinese government retains control because they control information, and the people never realized what they could have achieved. Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers, Kim Jong-il all rule at the consent of the people who choose to abdicate their own power and responsibility. They continue to rule by preventing their subjects from finding that out.

But, this is our country, and, we know. And, there is no excuse for concentrating sovereignty in our government, lest it become independent of us. Our government only requires the authority to represent our sovereignty in issues involving foreign powers, or, in duties delegated to it by the Constitution. We are the supreme rulers, we are the monarchs, you and I. We are supposed to be the directors of the United States government, not the subjects of it. But, too many before us have given up their natural sovereignty and allowed a group of congressmen and and some presidents to amass your power for their own advantage. And they treat with arrogance and contempt anyone that points out what they have done. The problem with that is that kind of power concentrated is always eventually squandered. It seldom, if ever, ends up benefitting the donor. I cannot stress enough that our government is not a spectator sport. It demands your deliberation and participation. Nothing less than your personal sovereignty is at stake.

I think it necessary at this point to note that conservative capitalism is the only social system that places value on personal sovereignty because it seeks to encourage, for the benefit of all, individual initiative. In a breif 230 year period, this country working under that system and operating with the citizens ultimately responsible has led mankind from ten thousand years of using animals for machinery and living at the whim of the weather to the Computer Age and unequalled living standards. And, untill now, The United States was the only country to recognize, let alone be operated under, the citizen's sovereignty. This was done because because historically, Socialism and it's ugly sisters only benefit a few at the top for a realitively short time before it collapses and spreads misery equally, and things get pretty intolerable preceeding the collapse. Millions of others have paid the price for proving that corollary, history books are full of the accounts. That's why our Constitution seeks to avoid re-proving it. That's why the responsibility of sovereignty was vested with us. Yet, there are, amazingly, those who would seek yet another demonstration, in person, blind to the inevitable resulting tragedy.

If anyone still wants tickets to that runaway bus, they're avaliable in November at a polling place near you. Just don't take the rest of us with you.