To grant license means to give permission, and by licence you mean being forced to pay for unwanted television?

Neither would be congruent with liberty.

Live free or die. Seems pretty simple.

I think Guy meant licence, the noun, in the sense of "excessive" freedom, as in of speech or behaviour, the sense which also gives us "licentious".

Licensing, the verb, suggests the imprimatur of officialdom, which indeed seems antithetical to liberty; the only question is whether licence in this sense doesn't carry the same overtones. "Excessive" by whose standards? To say "liberty is everywhere evident in licence" is implicitly disapproving, since it suggests that when people have liberty they will inevitably behave badly or exceed some arbitrary limit that by some "oversight" has never been properly expressed in law.

Does the idea of licence thus lay the groundwork for licensing? Perhaps. Certainly the one seems to be invoked only by those who generally plead for the other.

Is this Mandeville, Burke? It makes a beep like the alarm of a watch in a deep drawer somewhere in the room of memory.

It is not given in its context, which is probably important to its intent. But here seems to seek extent.

But, we are looking at the concept of "permission' in either case. And if freedom to act is by permission, it is not liberty, for liberty is inherent and not derived from authority that grants permission.
So what is free action by "licence" is NOT evidence of liberty, it is the evidence of the need for permission.

Tman, in Japan, your quote is rewritten as, 'Live free or diet.'

RRS: 'permission' implies 'control'. You are talking about control from the outside. What about self-control?

Liberty depends on self restraint (on the control of reason over the passions that was once meant by positive liberty - before this term came to mean material benefits). Unless human beings can govern themselves (control their lusts and so on) then governments have an excuse to move in.

Although it is absurd to expect moral improvement from the state (a point both Burke and Gladstone were fond of making) if human beings are tearing at each other like rabid dogs then state power is going to look like a good option (in spite of the fact that it will not work, because those in control of the state are as imperfect as other men, and for other reasons).

In short liberty must not give way to licence - we must each do our best to prevent the triumph of evil in ourselves.

The libertarian (the person interested in liberty lasting) should be no libertine.