The Sovereign Individual
From citizen to customer
Jurisdictions start competing
The Sovereign Individual, chapters 7 to 10
Written in 1997, the book predicts governments will have to compete. This is the chain that gets them there, and who pays.
What actually happened?
Written in 1997, the chapter reads like a memoir. Digital cash will appear, outside the reach of any government's printing press. Work will come loose from place, so the most productive people can create wealth anywhere. Then the chain closes: once both the money and the people can move, leaving stops being a threat and becomes a Tuesday. Governments then have to bid for residents the way a company bids for customers, with tax rates, courts and services as the quotation. The citizen is turning into a customer. The cold part of the argument is who is left: those who cannot move and depend on what redistribution pays.
The right to leave is the hardest card at the table
The mechanism under the whole book is exit beating voice. When the cost of walking away is low enough, you no longer have to persuade anyone to improve; the possibility of leaving does the arguing. So the first move in a personal strategy is making income and assets portable.
Two equally good people: one whose ability is only worth something inside this company, one with a portfolio anybody can check. The second never has to raise his voice.
Run due diligence on a jurisdiction like a supplier
If the citizen is a customer, then where you live, where you incorporate and where you pay tax are three separable contracts, each with a price and a service level. Most people take the place they were born as the default on all three and have never once compared.
A company weighs five legal systems before it registers. The same person picks a city out of habit, though it is the largest hidden expense of his life.
The predictions came true unevenly
Digital cash and remote work arrived. What the authors underrated was the staying power of the nation-state: identity, welfare and safety are needs nobody can pack in a suitcase, and they hold most people in place. Take the direction of this book and discount its timetable.
Allocate along the trend — portable skills, more than one option on jurisdiction — and act at the pace of the actual world. No burnt bridges, no bet on a date.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you are laying out a decade of your work or your life.
Ask first: what fraction of my income and assets travels with me, and have I ever compared the contract I hold with the place I live?
Where it goes wrong: reading sovereign individual as permission to leave every community — exit is leverage, not a way to live — or buying the timetable whole and mortgaging the present to a world twenty years out.
Lines to keep
Digital cash will appear, beyond the reach of any government's printing press.
The information age divides people into those who can move and those who cannot.
Governments will bid for taxpayers the way companies bid for customers.
Same situation, other people are asking
Now that I'm out, I need one small thing to aim at.New country. What of mine actually came with me?New city, and I don't know a soul.I moved here and nothing comes to me.Moving somewhere new · all 10 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.