Yes, Sovereignty is final authority. The sovereign commands and is not commanded. If he has an emperor or pope over him, he is not sovereign.

Foseti-sovereign is about particular choices. If everyone in the country got together to fight over where my wallet would be tomorrow, someone would win. That person is the sovereign of my wallet.

Jim-sovereign is about particular individuals. If someone has Foseti-sovereignty over some decisions but not others, they are not Jim-sovereign.

Foseti-sovereignty is indeed conserved, Jim-sovereignty indeed not conserved.

I would like to read more about Yugoslavia and the European army

Typical and famous example: October 1993: Swedish troops sent in to protect the Muslims in Tuzla from Serbian armored forces. Serbian armored forces running low on fuel. Demand at gunpoint ten thousand gallons of fuel from the Swedes. Swedes hand it over.

Europeans thought they were sending in troops, found they were sending in hostages. At some point someone is going to realize that Europe is basically undefended and will steal all the valuables and enslave all the hot chicks.

Foseti’s sovereignty is Mencius’ sovereignty. It is this: for any decision, there can be conflict, and only one person can win that conflict. The canonical example is whether my wallet stays in my pocket or migrates to yours. I can make the decision, or you, or the state, or my mom or indeed anyone. Whoever has the power to win that conflict has sovereignty over my wallet.

I’m not quite sure what Jim’s sovereignty is. Nevertheless, it seems to me that all his predictions and descriptions of situations are true. So, simply work backwards to see what must be true for those things to happen, and that is Jim’s sovereignty.

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I believe Jim’s power is coercive power over others. Political powers. This power is indeed not conserved – the sovereignty sensu Moldbug can revert to the individual. When Charles did not claim the powers, then the decisions that Cromwell used to make reverted to the natural decision-maker.

In today’s America who has final authority? The supremes? The president? Michael Mann? The vast anonymous bureaucracy in the state department that unseats kings and appoints mobs to rule lesser nations?

Yes. The answer is yes.

The problem is that they all have final authority on some tiny shard of reality. Tiny, overlapping, shifting shards. As a result, almost maximum uncertainty, as a result, most of the power and effort goes toward competing for shards in highly negative-sum games with strong externalities.

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When Foseti and Moldbug say sovereignty is conserved, they simply mean someone must win all conflicts. Perhaps it would help if they stopped equivocating, since Mencius sometimes uses ‘sovereign’ as a synonym for King or Neocameralist Majority Stockholder. (Occasionally even The People.)

He tells us that the USG, the hegemon, the world sovereign, should respect the sovereignty of lesser powers.

Difference between ‘does’ and ‘must.’ An absolute sovereign cannot be forced to obey. It would be wise to do so anyway.

(Perhaps worth mentioning that I buy Szabo’s argument that historical ‘absolute’ monarchs were more smoke than fire.)

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Moldbug analyzes military power well, but ignores at least two others – the power of banks, and the power of moral legitimacy. Technically speaking a well-organized military is required for and trumps both others, but in practice a military’s organization is a function of both. Wars are made of people, just like markets.

“Fractured sovereignty, where you have competing institutions”

“This is a bad question, for it distinguishes between things that are alike, and fails to distinguish between things that are different.”

Having a fractured military hierarchy or loyalties is indeed bad. As far as it goes, Mencius’ analysis is accurate.

However, it is impossible to perfectly align military interests with moral legitimacy, and it is as impossible to eliminate morality as a factor as to eliminate the military as a force.

The Australian squatters have moral legitimacy. The Australian army feels this just as do the squatters. The government would like to actually take sovereignty over their land, but finds it too costly, since it would have to force its own army to obey and only then force the squatters to obey.

Technically there’s a competing legitimacy – you’re supposed to do what the law says. However, the laws here are felt to be illegitimate. The government could probably force another confrontation.

There’s also electoral legitimacy. The government cannot be seen to stray too far from the will of the people. Unlike gay marriage, which affects almost nobody, it is very hard to make effective propaganda on property rights.

This conflict is resolved in favour of property rights, which means the squatters get to make the decisions about the physical land. However, the government (specifically, some bureaucrat) has sovereignty over maps/appearances.

Well let’s indeed say a decision needs to be made about who owns a piece of land. How are such decisions most commonly made? How should they be made?

(2) A polity could do what the vast majority of polities actually do. Consult the title registry. Look at the boundaries. Look at who transferred title to whom. In other words, follow general rules.

Most governments, most of the time, attempt to have system one, yet, strangely, fail, sometimes fail with quite extraordinarily large amounts of bloodshed, and find themselves with system two

This also assumes that there is even a dispute in the first place. But there is no “conservation of disputes:”. Whether there is a dispute in the first place, and how often disputes arise within or between polities, and how severe they are, depends on how clear the rules are and what the political relationships between the parties is. (Brothers, for example, are generally speaking more likely to compromise than to weaken each other with respect to more distant relatives).

For simplicity, let’s say we have two people playing a game. By definition, a game must have rules of some kind.
There are a number of different variables to take into account. They can be friends or not, the game can be for money or status or not, the rules can created by themselves or can be part of a tradition, they can have an umpire or not, and the umpire can be picked by themselves or not. None of these variables are key, though. The two key variables are discussed below
There are also a number of different possible analogies to “sovereignty” in games. We could say that sovereignty is making the rules, sovereignty is applying the rules to a given incident, or else that sovereignty is any of the foregoing plus being able to make the decision stick. In the first two analogies, sovereignty can be divided by definition, so let’s look at the last one: a decision “sticking” in this context would mean that if the players do not accept the decision, the game cannot continue. A key aspect of games is the players’ ability to walk away, even at extremely high cost (forfeiting contracts and esteem, in the case of professionals). It seems that the ability to walk away may be a distinction between games and sovereignty that needs more discussion. You can’t walk away from government, right? Well, you can, but the costs are high. If you refuse to participate, you will be imprisoned or even killed. But this is actually still analagous to a game where the costs of non-participation are high, but where non-participation is still an option. (Where a sovereign threatens death as the price of non-participation may be a special case where we can’t lump believers in Nature or in Nature’s God together, because for believers merely in nature death may be more than just an extreme form of quitting the game.) In any case, given the present state of technology, exploring the game analogy has already revealed fundamental limits to sovereignty—a sovereign cannot compel you to do or think as he wishes, he can only impose costs on you for refusing to comply. The caveat “given the present state of technology” suggests other inherent limits on sovereignty. The sovereign is limited by physical laws and facts (“Congress cannot repeal the law of gravity,” e.g.), by the current state of knowledge and technology, and so on. The umpire cannot decree that the players be more skilled than they are nor that the sun stay shining into the night to illuminate the court. So the real question is not whether there are limits on sovereignty. There are, and they are so obvious that they tend to be overlooked merely because they are so obvious, like the largest words on a map. The real question is whether, within those limits, sovereignty is “conserved,” i.e., whether it necessarily can be found only within one actor in the game.
At first glance you’d think that the other key variable, besides the player’s cost of walking away from the game, is the cost to a sovereign of the player walking away from the game. But this is only a different variable if you make an artificial distinction between the sovereign and the other players, which is putting the cart before the horse. Who the sovereign is or the sovereigns is something to be determined, not assigned ex ante. In effect, then, in any game all you have is players, some possibly called umpires, some not. The real variable is what costs each player will bear if the rules or the application of the rules doesn’t go his way versus the costs of his non-participation versus the costs he can impose on others (including simply the cost of his non-participation, which is always an option). Sovereignty being conserved would imply (1) that there is one player who can *always* impose costs on the players that are greater than the costs to them of *any* rule or application of a rule that he might desire, and on whom the other players can never impose costs greater than the benefit to him of any rule or application of a rule he might desire or (2) that games always reduce to one player. Neither seems likely in the real world.
The other key variable is whether the players realize that they are playing a game. Players can be constrained by lack of imagination. A player can do that which is unthinkable, but he can’t do that which he’s never thought of. If he takes the rules of the game for granted, he won’t exercise sovereignty over them.
So whether or not sovereignty is conserved, a necessary step to its conservation is deconstruction of the rules.

(1) We could say it’s all about sovereignty, and the guy at the top of our chain of command can at his whim decide at any given time that he wishes that any piece of land he cares about belongs to whatever person he wishes.

OR

(2) A polity could do what the vast majority of polities actually do. Consult the title registry. Look at the boundaries. Look at who transferred title to whom. In other words, follow general rules.

Yes, there will occasionally be disputes over boundaries or title transfers. Extreme ambiguity can turn general rules into opportunities for command. But these are uncommon edge cases. The newspaper headlines and the law school textbook cases, but not the norm.

To the extent the idea of “sovereignty”, much less the even more ambiguous claim “sovereignty is conserved”, is even meaningful, it must mean the ability for a decision-maker to turn a situation into an opportunity for that decision-maker to make the decision he most wishes to make. But the opportunity to turn a general rule into an opportunity for arbitrary command depends both on the relationships involved between himself and other decision-makers, and on the ambiguity of the situation and the rules involved. In the case of land ownership, as in the vast majority of legal decisions (the boring ones the entertainment business of “news” never tells you about), the situation and the relationships are such that the decision is inevitable. A judge in the U.S. for example has no practical ability to overturn the vast majority of land transfers or to redraw the vast majority of land boundaries under his jurisdiction. Occasionally the ambiguity of a rule or situation is great enough that a judge has great decision-making powers over a piece of land, but in the vast majority of situations he has practically none. Sovereignty is not conserved. (If indeed that last phrase whether the positive or negative is anything but gibberish).