The Permitted State: A Theory of Conditional Political Power
Political power begins with the individual, not the state. Government exists only by permission, for the narrow task of preventing aggression. Everything beyond that is excess and illegitimate.
Written By: Dr Bryan Theunissen
1. Begin With the Person, Not the Palace
Most political thought begins by assuming the state exists. Constitutions, charters, and checks and balances all flow from that premise. The debate is always about restraint: how much power the state should have, not whether it is entitled to any power at all.
This starting point is philosophically backwards.
The individual exists first. Human beings are free agents, not subjects of a preordained institution. Political theory that begins with the state silently smuggles in the very authority it later claims to constrain.
A coherent alternative reverses the sequence:
Start with free individuals and ask only what minimal powers they would reluctantly delegate to a common authority to prevent violence and fraud.
The state is not self-justifying. Its existence is permitted, conditional, and revocable. Everything else is excess.
2. The 36-Person Colony
Imagine thirty-six people stranded on a new continent. No history, no bureaucracy, no ideological baggage—only the raw fact of human coexistence. They face a single problem:
How can free individuals live together without being destroyed by one another?
Not how to engineer equality. Not how to mandate virtue. Not how to administer public goods.
Only this: how to prevent the initiation of force.
The obvious solution is a delegated authority: a protection squad, empowered solely to prevent aggression and fraud. The powers are:
• Delegated upward by individuals
• Strictly limited to defensive functions
• Constantly revocable
This is the Permitted State.
3. The Three Laws of Delegation
Once the state is grounded in human permission, three principles follow naturally:
Law 1 — No one may initiate force.
Individuals, groups, and institutions alike.
Law 2 — Delegated authority cannot exceed personal authority.
I have no right to confiscate your property or dictate your life; therefore, I cannot authorise the state to do so on my behalf.
Law 3 — Delegated powers are conditional and revocable.
The state has no rights of its own. Its powers are loans, not entitlements.
These are simple, memorable, and devastatingly effective in limiting government to its legitimate purpose.
4. By What Right?
If power begins with the individual, most state activity is illegitimate. The state may not:
• Redistribute wealth
• Regulate peaceful exchange
• Police speech or belief
• Conscribe, indoctrinate, or moralise
• Micro-manage economic life
• Punish victimless behaviour
• Conduct surveillance without direct evidence
• Impose duties individuals do not naturally owe one another
None of these powers exist in the hands of a free person; delegating them violates the moral priority of the individual.
5. The Sole Legitimate Function
Only one family of powers is morally delegable: neutral, defensive force to prevent or punish aggression and fraud.
Courts, dispute resolution, police, and a defensive military (strictly controlled) are the full catalogue. Everything else is excess, a violation of conditional consent.
6. Why States Always Grow
Even minimal states tend to expand. Public-choice dynamics explain why:
• Concentrated benefits, diffuse costs: Small groups profit from new powers, while costs are spread thinly across millions.
• Bureaucratic self-preservation: Departments never vote to shrink themselves.
• Political incentives: Politicians buy votes with promises funded by future taxpayers.
• Crisis exploitation: Emergencies justify new powers that are never surrendered.
A Permitted State must be defended with the vigilance one would afford a home. Power, once granted, does not politely recede.
7. Four Common Objections, Refuted
Objection 1 — Exploitation Without a Strong State
Critics claim the powerful will exploit the weak. This equivocates between inequality and coercion.
Economic leverage is not coercion. Talent, inheritance, or voluntary agreements create asymmetries, but they do not involve force. Coercion begins only where violence or fraud occurs—exactly what the Permitted State prohibits.
Objection 2 — Poverty and Starvation
Some argue people will starve without a welfare state. This is emotionally potent but historically naive.
The worst famines—Holodomor, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, North Korea—were state-made catastrophes. Free societies, by contrast, generate voluntary assistance: mutual aid societies, religious charities, neighbourhood solidarity, crowdfunding. Coerced redistribution creates dependency; voluntary charity builds community.
The Permitted State prevents starvation by force; it does not criminalise misfortune or legislate virtue.
Objection 3 — Contagion and Environmental Harm
Direct, provable harm to an identifiable person is aggression: poisoning a river, knowingly infecting someone. That is enforceable.
But probabilistic or collective harms (mass quarantines, emissions taxes, blanket mandates) violate causation and proportionality. Punishing the innocent alongside the guilty is not legitimate. Only targeted, evidence-based intervention respects conditional consent.
Objection 4 — National Defence
Defence is a legitimate state function, but only defensively. Voluntary militias, insurance-funded protection, or temporary wartime taxation with sunset clauses are permissible. Standing armies, empire-building, and preventive war are not.
8. The Society That Arises
The Permitted State does not promise utopia. It leaves room for misfortune, inequality, and error. But it removes the greatest enabler of human harm: the institutionalised initiation of force.
In such a society:
• Adults are treated as adults
• Choices have consequences
• People help one another by choice
• Government stands guard at the perimeter, not in the centre
• Prosperity emerges from cooperation, not command
It is not perfect. It is free.
9. Conclusion: Power by Permission Alone
The Permitted State exists only because individuals allow it, and only for the narrow purpose of preventing aggression. Every other aim—however noble—requires coercion and violates its conditional legitimacy.
Power exists by permission, not right.
And only for as long as it remembers why it was allowed to exist at all.
Bryan Theunissen is a South African doctor with a stubborn streak of optimism. Even after years of watching bad policy win, he still insists on pointing to better choices.