Throughout history, human societies have had significantly more freedom than is common today.
For almost all of human history - covering more than 99.99% of our time on Earth as Homo - borders as we understand them did not exist, and people could move freely across regions without the need for passports or visas.1
- National borders are arbitrary and have continually changed throughout history, enforced by states.
- The state holds a monopoly on the legal use of force, primarily to extract resources to finance its existence - taking a part of individuals’ earnings through taxes.
Consider your daughter’s melon plants in the backyard, and her chicken providing an egg a day. Now a portion of this - say 20%, 30%, even 50% - is taken by the state as tax. She never consented to giving away two or three eggs per week to the state for the rest of her life. Well, that might have been the case anytime, anywhere, 5,000 years ago: born in Jericho, Uruk or Memphis, you had to pay tax on your earnings, and that wasn’t consensual either. Yet you had free movement, and you could opt out - move to another city with lower taxes, or somewhere with no taxes at all.
Historically, for the vast majority of human existence, we owned our means of production and had the right to consent to taxes - or move freely elsewhere. Today you have no such choice: you pay taxes and cannot freely relocate without state permission, or in accordance with its alliances.
In the past, slaves had restricted freedom of movement and could keep only a portion of the fruits of their labor - the rest claimed by their masters. So what really differentiates your situation today? You retain only a portion of your labor’s output, your freedom is restricted by state boundaries, and you almost never have the chance to opt out.
As it has been in the past, some slave masters were kind while others were not. Some allowed you to keep enough of the fruits of your labor to sustain a decent life with your family; others did not. Some took care of you when you were sick, some gave you education; others did not. Some restricted your movement to a very small area and required you to be literally chained; others allowed you to move freely within the village, the city, the territory. But still - you were a slave, and your master had a monopoly over your labor and your freedom.
Similarly, some states today let you retain a large portion of your labor’s fruits - 80%, 90% - enabling a very decent life. Some offer health insurance and education; others do not. In some places your freedom of movement is very limited; in others, a passport lets you travel visa-free to many places. But conceptually, nothing has changed. It is fundamentally the same as the old slavery: labor exploitation plus limited freedom of movement.
What will our grandchildren call this? Every era’s normal gets its name from the next one. Ours is pending…
Footnotes
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Passports as movement-limiting documents are a recent invention, emerging prominently after the turmoil of the World Wars. Very likely, your great-grandparents arrived in the country you are in today without needing a visa or a passport. ↩