Subject: Via Anarcho-Capitalists' Forum: The sovereign movement Sat Apr 06, 2019 11:57 pm
The Sovereign Citizen movement, according to Wikipedia, is a loose grouping of American and Commonwealth litigants, commentators and tax protesters, and financial-scheme promoters. FT Alphaville (or at least this FT Alphavillain) had not really heard of the Sovereign movement until a few weeks ago, when we were, by chance, introduced to it in the process of investigating another (not yet ready for publication) story. Long story short, a bunch of syndicate investors had found themselves exposed to a long running scam and lost a not insubstantial amount of money as a result. They were now taking legal action to try and recover said funds in an entirely reasonable collective manner.
But there was, at the same time, something different about this set of investors. They, it turns out, identified as sovereign men. As we looked further into the matter we discovered their movement championed the same sort of extreme libertarian thinking that drives much crypto investing. You know the rhetoric: tax is theft; the government is a coercive terrorist; the Fed is a manipulative private institution intent on debasing the currency; hyperinflation is everywhere; the dollar is dead. But on closer inspection, the movement's objectives were actually more simplistic: this was good old fashioned tax avoidance. It's just that it was morally justified in their minds by a political ideology focused on secret insights into the real nature of human rights and justice. Insights only they had apparently stumbled upon, giving them a unique competitive advantage over the rest of drone society. Which suddenly posed a dilemma in our minds. Should the investing travails of a group that openly and unashamedly pursues tax avoidance via all sorts of complex legal practices (involving among other things dual citizenship) be given any sympathetic coverage? The potential scam itself was interesting, but now our thinking was that the bigger and more interesting story was the Sovereign movement itself. And then, just as we were planning a deep dive, the New York Times came out with their equivalent. And, yes, it's too good to try and improve on in any imminent way (as the following snippet demonstrates):
Quote :
How Sovereign Citizens Helped Swindle $1 Billion From the Government They Disavow
Quote :
Sovereigns, who sometimes call themselves “freemen” or “state citizens,” have no foundational document, but broadly they subscribe to an alternate version of American history. The tale can vary from sovereign to sovereign, but it goes roughly like this: At some point, a corporation secretly usurped the United States government, then went bankrupt and sought aid from international bankers. As collateral, the corporation offered the financiers … us. As sovereigns tell it, your birth certificate and Social Security card are not benign documents, but contracts that enslave you.
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There is, they believe, a pathway to freedom: Renounce these contracts or otherwise assert your sovereignty. (Mr. Morton said he once told the Social Security Administration, “I don’t want this number.”) Then no one — not the taxman, not the police — can tell you what to do. Not all sovereigns are conmen, but their belief system lends itself to deceit. You might declare yourself a “diplomat” from a nonexistent country. (Mr. Morton represented the Republic of New Lemuria and the Dominion of Melchizedek.) Or start a fake Native American tribe. Or blow off a court case because the American flag in the courtroom has gold fringe. Some sovereigns have even lashed out violently at law enforcement officers, which is why they’re considered a domestic terrorism threat.
Based on the above, the movement's key rationale is renouncing taxes on the basis that only common law applies to a free individual and if you did not consciously agree to be taxed, you don't have to pay. Common to the movement too, as the NYT explains, is the tendency to wrap nonsense into enough legalese that it sounds plausible in a court of law. But actually, when tested, it never is.
We'll leave the core tale of the NYT story -- about a sovereign man-originated scam promising the public that they can claim a refund from the government for the value they are fractionalising on the back of their servitude via the submission of a simple form -- for readers to catch up on in their own time.
But the countless videos on YouTube depicting sovereign citizens having a go at asserting their rights in courts of law is undeniably intoxicatingly enthralling. It's a thing. It's fascinating. And it needs its own Netflix series.
But here's the other thing.
While the sovereign concept may seem mad, there's an uncomfortable rationality at its core that is hard to ignore due to the truths it inadvertently reveals about the world we live in today.
In our globalised digital world governments are losing power. And it's because the people who run our global conglomerates constitute exactly the sort of sovereign "citizens of nowhere" who understand arcane aspects of legal systems better than most other citizens. Armed with this knowledge they take on governments and states, cutting tax deals that suit them, not the public.
Tax as a consequence is no longer universal. It is negotiable. And the rate you're charged depends on who you are, who you represent, how much you know and what leverage you've got against the state.
As a result even the most powerful governments are failing to enforce a level tax playing field. In so doing they're failing to raise the revenues they need to support the basic public services we have come to accept as essential human rights.
What's worse is that the scale of the loss is unknowable. There's tax evasion, there's tax avoidance but now, thanks to super sovereign citizens, there's also tax negotiation.
And realistically, no matter what governments do, it's unlikely tax collection will ever become any easier. The litigation expense alone is nation-state bankrupting. The only recourse comes in ever smaller states (in geographic terms) because these are easier to police by tax authorities and benefit from lower public service overheads. Hence why the offshore jurisdictions do so much better in the current global race to the bottom than all others.
Unfortunately, if Brexit is any clue, that's not a pathway that's acceptable to most people - despite the reality that so many common tariffs, taxes and regulations linked to ever larger states are increasingly irrelevant since so many of them are unenforceable.
In the context of diminished government power the entire case against cryptocurrency -- based on the government's superior fiat over the individual, and ability to extract tax -- becomes questionable. After all, if a third party (such as a hacker with a ransom request) has better extractive powers than the government, chances are it's the currency they demand (irrespective of how poorly structured, expensive to use or badly distributed it is) which will supersede all other currencies.
Which leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that perhaps sovereign citizens are not mad. They’re just not yet operating on the same scale as the global companies that subscribe to the same ideology.
Subject: Via Anarcho-Capitalists' Forum: The sovereign movement 
Sat Apr 06, 2019 11:57 pm
