Much of the impetus for the settling of the western hemisphere was frustration at the constraints of Europe. All the land of Europe was controlled by some ruler or other and people living on those lands owed some sort of fealty to the ruler--taxes, soldiers, etc. So when two new continents (and not too long later, a third) suddenly became available, lots of people made the move. It was expensive and dangerous and very hard work, and very few ever saw their homeland again. Many of the colonists paid for their journey by selling themselves into indentured servitude, and much of the hard work was done by captured slaves.
The rulers of the old world and their colonial proxies often tried to impose unwelcome restrictions and taxes. In many cases, they assumed that the colonists would be like the residents of the old world and have no choice but to pay up. But in the new world, there was more land--if the colonists didn't like the way they were being treated and they were not indentured or slaves, they could simply pick up and leave, and build a new house and farm and community in the next valley over. For 300 years, even after most of the colonies had become independent nations, there was always more land. If you wanted to, you could go settle on unclaimed land and there would be no official to take exception. The natives and other potential settlers might take exception, however, and settlers had to be prepared to defend themselves against violence from them, in addition to the hard work of making a home and farm on the new land. This was generally much easier and safer if the settler was part of a community or mutual aid society, but there was no help available from any government.
This all ended in the 19th century. Nearly all the land was taken. In the USA, a lot of this was driven by the Homestead Act, which gave title to 160 acres of unclaimed land (more in some particularly dry places) to anyone who could prove that they'd settled the land for 5 years and had made improvements and had never been in rebellion, plus the government-subsidized transcontinental railroads, as well as an extensive network of cavalry patrols and fortifications. At first, this was funded by the grant and/or sale of the land itself, but after all the good land was taken, the expenses became too much and early in the 20th century, income taxes were imposed.
Still, the feeling was that America was settled by pioneers who did it on their own and owed nothing to the federal government and only a little to the state or community. It hasn't been true since President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862. The act was specifically structured to emphasize the growth of Union supporting territories during the Civil War, and those who had supported the Confederacy were often hostile to those aspects. But after the Confederacy lost in 1865, many took advantage anyway and both sides wanted to let bygones be bygones. No matter how many Confederacy-supporting homesteaders wish to deny it, a homestead is not a sovereign nation and the security and existence of the homestead owes a lot to the federal, Union government.
At one level, this is unfortunate. If you really want to live on your own, with your own beliefs and practices, with collaborators who all agree with you, and no support or taxes at all, why shouldn't you be able to? Slavery was one such practice--the slaveholders thought it was a great deal, and they tended to rationalize it with views like the one expressed by Cliven Bundy last week. But the slaves were less happy about this arrangement. Polygamy was another. The Mormons chose to settle in Utah, territory that was so uninhabitable that they assumed nobody else would ever challenge them for it. To their credit, they made a good living on the terrible land, but the surrounding nation soon encroached polygamy was banned. Many of the "victims" of polygamy seem happy with their situation and some may in fact be better off, but most are not, and it's a kind of slavery. The reality is that there are very few such views that can be tolerated in a free society, and believing that it's ok to not pay your taxes or grazing fees is such a view. The too much, this sort of freedom is about slavers and polluters being allowed to get away with it. Even though the "freedom lovers" deny it, the burden on the rest of us is too high.
It's probably a good thing for society that all the free land in America was spoken for within a few decades of the end of the Civil War, because this forced such dangerous views into the open. But Mr. Bundy has made it clear that after a century and a half, the destructive views still exist.
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