In 1761, lawyer James Otis delivered a five-hour speech in a packed Boston courthouse in which he dismantled Parliament’s claim that general search warrants known as writs-of-assistance were constitutionally valid. Though Otis lost the case, his scholarly and fiery rhetoric won the support of onlookers such as 25-year-old John Adams, who near the end of his life, wrote about his experience:

Every Man of an immense crowded Audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take Arms against Writs of Assistants. Then and there was the first scene of the first Act of opposition to the Arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the Child Independence was born.

What did Otis say that revolutionized so many people? Author-researcher A.J. Langguth tells us the King’s advocate, Jeremiah Gridley, delivered a death blow to Otis’s case by claiming “the British constitution was now only and whatever Parliament said it was.” Therefore, case closed.

But not for Otis. He fought back, taking Enlightenment philosophy to its logical conclusion. As you read Otis’s words consider how utterly foreign they sound in today’s world, while at the same sparking exhilaration to know men once spoke like this:

Every man was his own sovereign . . . No other creature on earth could legitimately challenge a man’s right to his life, his liberty and his property. That principle, that unalterable law, took precedence—here Otis was answering Gridley directly—even over the survival of the state. (emphasis added)

Given that today states are sovereign entities wherever they exist, and by virtue of that status can legally overpower any domestic challenger, to assert that each individual is sovereign would seem at best wishful thinking. Individuals can act like they’re sovereign but the state will carry them off somewhere, if necessary. If “state” is defined in Rothbardian terms as a criminal gang writ large, then the adage “might is right” permeates state behavior. Stripped of its august facade, that’s what state sovereignty means. Otis was saying we don’t need states. ...

The government so formed would be the creation of people who were delegated to form a government. But in doing so, the delegates—intentionally or not—transfer sovereignty from the individuals to the government, and the result is the chaos and corruption that follows. By contrast, on the free market under laissez-faire, which means without coercive interference, individuals conduct their economic lives without surrendering their sovereignty.

It’s not as if governments don’t realize the economic value of freedom. The ones in charge seem to have heard about Aesop and his tale of the goose. Paine spent the first 37 years of his life in England and had experienced this first-hand:

The portion of liberty enjoyed in England is just enough to enslave a country more productively than by despotism, and that as the real object of all despotism is revenue, a government so formed obtains more than it could do either by direct despotism, or in a full state of freedom, and is, therefore on the ground of interest, opposed to both. ..

No one would question that “something” must be yielded to gain a definite result. But surrendering sovereignty should never be on the table.