Very few people in human history have had the opportunity to live lives in a free society, even relatively speaking. Not many others have even wrapped their minds completely around the concept. How does a society function without someone to give orders, to govern?
Some early American colonists lived as free people, and Murray Rothbard chronicled that period in a four volume set titled Conceived in Liberty. A portion of that opus has been published on the net for the first time, including this excerpt:
The Quakers, led by Thomas Lloyd, now embarked on a shrewd and determined campaign of resistance to the imposition of a state. Thomas Lloyd, as keeper of the great seal, insisted that none of Blackwell's orders or commissions was valid unless stamped with the great seal. Lloyd, the keeper refused to do the stamping. It is amusing to find Edward Channing and other thorough but not overly imaginative historians deeply puzzled by this resistance: "This portion of Pennsylvania history is unusually difficult to understand. We find, for instance, so strong and intelligent a man as Thomas Lloyd declining to obey what appeared to be reasonable and legal direction on the part of the proprietor. As keeper of the great seal of the province, Lloyd refused point blank to affix that emblem of authenticity to commissions which Blackwell presented to him." What Channing failed to understand was that Pennsylvanians were engaged in a true revolutionary situation, that they were all fiercely determined to thwart the reimposition of a burdensome state upon their flourishing stateless society. That is why even the most "reasonable and legal" orders were disobeyed, for Pennsylvanians had for some years been living in a world where no one was giving orders to anyone else.
Early Pennsylvanians were happily living in anarchy, and modern academics have a hard time even grasping the idea.
H/T to Jesse Walker.
