ABSTRACT
Long before talk of the globalization of the world’s economy began some thirty-five years ago, the demise of the nation-state had been widely predicted. Actually, the best and the brightest have been predicting the nation-state’s demise for two hundred years, beginning with Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” through Karl Marx in “Withering Away of the State,” to Bertrand Russell’s speeches in the 1950s and 1960s. The latest such prediction by eminent and serious people appears in a book called The Sovereign Individual by Lord William Rees-Mogg, former editor of the London Times and now vice chairman of the BBC, and James Dale Davidson,
chairman of Britain’s National Tax Payers’ Union. ReesMogg and Davidson assert that for all but the lowest earners the Internet will make avoiding taxes so easy and riskless that sovereignty will inevitably shift to the individual, leaving the nation-state to die of fiscal starvation.
