Where in his op-ed does Sunstein argue that “the mere existence of government guaranteed liberties”?

In the phrase “There is no liberty without dependency” from which it follows that in order to be free I must first be dependent. Government therefore is the pre-condition for liberty, which is a nonsense, because where does the first freely chosen government come from, if freedom depends on its pre-existence? Logically the only free people are a subset of those who are already governed, because they must be first be dependent in order to have liberty.

Sunstein’s mistake is this: while governments are sometimes necessary to preserve liberty, they are not the originators of it. People can be free just because they are; and subsequently they institute governments to secure their rights, but their rights do not proceed from dependency. Rather they are unalienable, unless Sunstein takes that to simply be a figure of speech. Bureaucracies are an afterthought, not the source of liberty themselves. If dependency was requisite to liberty, then only among the governed should we hope to find free men.

If Sunstein were right then given enough dependency, enough government, we would inevitably find liberty. On the other hand, without dependency, without government, we should never hope to find it. But that’s not true and hence, Sunstein is wrong.

There is another aspect to this which I am not enough of a scholar to address. It was the idea that liberty should be based on property. The idea that a man was free flowed from the assertion that he owned himself, so to that extent he had a God-given liberty, because God gave him himself. The notion that man does not own himself unless it is validated by an external authority is an interesting one, but my own feeling is that is a dangerous concept, and counterintuitive to boot.

We bind ourselves together to remain ourselves. But we are who we are before we meet others, whatever Sunstein may think.