Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, and other political thinkers wrote little, if anything, on the sovereignty of the individual. It took the political thinkers of Colonial America to conceptualize that no citizen can give up certain rights, such as the right to be judge, jury and executioner, if he/she is not endowed at birth with all such rights one grants to the government. In other words the government, which has no sovereignty of its own except in relationship to other nations, cannot act in your name if its actions are not those which you yourself could do had you not given the state the right to act in your name.
Neither the States nor the nation is sovereign over you. This is why civil disobedience is often defensible.
You can't assign to the "common sovereignty" what you don't own as an individual.
What the critics also do not seem to realize, or choose to ignore, is that your individual sovereignty is guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment. It did not have to be in the form of an amendment. It could have been incorporated into the body of the Constitution, and perhaps it would have been a more secure safeguard of our sovereignty if it was in the body of the Constitution.
The Tenth Amendment states that the powers that don't belong to the federal government and are not prohibited to the States, are reserved to the States, "or to the people." But this is not a granting of rights which at its writing the government saw no need to retain. It is the written recognition of an existing fact: the rights which the people have not granted to the government are rights they retain.
The Founding Fathers always defined "the people" to be all individuals considered as a conceptual collective entity, but not as a thing in-itself that exists extant of the collective individuals that comprise it. In a situation where only two or three people may exist, such as on an island, it is foolish to talk of them as "the people." But in a nation of millions it is foolish to forget that those who disagree with a political decision remain a conceptual part of "the people"; and since they have rights which are sovereign (unalienable), democracy must never be allowed to deny individual, unalienable sovereignty.
"While ignoring the principles of individual liberty," said Rep. Ron Paul, in the House of Representatives in 2003, this nation was led into creating some serious errors Constitutional issues, in effect denying some liberties that had been reserved to individuals.
"The ideas of [pure] democracy, not the principles of [republican] liberty, were responsible for passage of the 16th Amendment. It imposed the income tax on the American people and helped to usher in the modern age of the welfare/warfare state," Paul said.
Laissez-faire is the economic state of man if no government bothered to tell him how to conduct his economic affairs. The First Amendment right to freedom of religion is the intellectual state of man where no government may tell him how to conduct his religious affairs.
Capitalism requires "a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church," wrote Ayn Rand.
“The Objectivist Ethics”; The Virtue of Selfishness
Such a separation of state and economics would achieve the natural state of man to conduct his affairs without government holding sovereignty over the individual. Granting sovereignty to the government in this realm of economics was not something contemplated by the authors of the Constitution, but neither was the return of communism to the shores of America anything they comtemplated.
The Founders could not have forgotten this communist endeavor, because Governor Bradford wrote one of the most politically elegant arguments against it, after giving it two years to work.
"The funding for the Pilgrims to go to the New World was provided under a contract with London merchants who wanted an economic profit from the venture. Under that contract whatever they produced was to be put into a common warehouse, with each one getting one equal share. All the land, buildings and end product were communally owned. Half of the Pilgrims died during the first winter, including Branford's wife." http://www.creationworldview.org/articles_view.asp?id=18
Bradford wrote: "[Ending corn collectivism] had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression." [italics added]http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/11/a_thanksgiving_.html
Capitalism without restraints is laissez-faire. Capitalism with restraints that deny the sovereignty of the owner of capital to apply his ownership rights is a "mixed economy." Laissez-faire is one of the conditions of the standards of "qua Man." ["search" this blog]
But laissez-faire does not deny that rational planning is necessary.
"During his years of teaching, Peter J. Boettke frequently used [Atlas Shrugged] as a teaching tool, comparing the economic ideas it taught with those in John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath".
[Boettke wrote:] "Rand makes the very important point that the critique of socialism was never against rational planning per se. Rather the question was who was to do the planning and the scope and the scale of the planning proposed." Blame It On Ayn Rand
Individual sovereignty is the state of every man in nature, before he agrees to relinquish some of it "in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to [themselves and their] Posterity."
It is the state of man as he would rule himself, not as he would deny others what is natural. It is the state of economic man not bound by direct and populist democracy. It is capital ruled by the natural laws of capital. The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
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