There’s a good case to be made that the subjects of medieval kings were freer de facto than a contemporary American. In theory, those subjects had no rights and little power with which to resist the myrmidons of the State. In practice, the ability of the monarch and his nobles to exercise power over them was limited by a combination of two factors: the weakness of the intrusive techniques available to them, and a lack of interest. If you’ll allow me a somewhat facetious comparison, George III could not control how fast the water streamed through his subjects’ shower heads, but at least as important, he didn’t care.
The techniques of omnipresent intrusion and control have been greatly elaborated since then. No, there’s no meter on your shower head that reports your current rate of water consumption to some level of government. Rather, the EPA, by decreeing regulations with the force of law concerning the manufacture of shower heads, has controlled your rate of water usage “at the source.” If the busybodies should some day decide that stiffer measures are “necessary” to prevent “waste,” similar clamps would be applied to local and regional water distributors. New federal regulations would decree that no household shall be supplied with more than X gallons of water per day. Water meters would be retrofitted with compliance measures. If you doubt the plausibility of this, note that similar changes to the metering of electrical power consumption are already proliferating.
