> The whole country and everything in it being the personal property of the sovereign sounds weird now, but that's basically how everything was until the invent

> The whole country and everything in it being the personal property of the sovereign sounds weird now, but that's basically how everything was until the invention of the modern concept of the state and constitutional monarchies. I think a central tension here is that today we think of governments and legal systems as providing the framework in which the market and transactions can take place. You and I can sign a contract for some transaction, and we can understand the legal system which may be used if we have some kind of dispute. A transaction that seeks to effectively remove that legal framework entirely does seem like it pushes you back to maintaining power though the same means as absolute monarchs (by having a loyal army). > Presumably the current government and you'd sign basically like a treaty I'd assume? Even this concept seems broken to me; ordinarily a treaty is an agreement which binds its participants to its terms going forward, but here we're imaging that the government ceases to exist and therefore has no behavior which can comply or fail to comply with those terms? But fundamentally, it does sound like the government of Nauru would not be empowered to "sell" Nauru; it does not own "the whole country and everything in it" and cannot sell it.